Samuel Kọ́láwọlé

Profile

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Gulf Coast, and Washington Square Review and is forthcoming from Harvard Review, Image Journal, and Evergreen Review.

His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Center, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, California, and Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. He was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, shortlisted for UK’s The First Novel Prize in 2019, and won a 2019 Editor-Writer Mentorship Program for Diverse Writers. Samuel has taught creative writing in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.

Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. He received an MFA in Writing & Publishing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He returned to VCFA to join the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program. He is completing his PhD at Georgia State University. He will be joining the Creative Writing Department at Penn State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Fiction in the fall of 2022. His novel is forthcoming from Amistad/HarperCollins.