Syl Cheney-Coker

Syl Cheney-Coker (born 1945 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) is widely recognized as one of Africa’s most important poets, novelists, and journalists. Educated at the University of Oregon, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Cheney-Coker began his career as a journalist and, in the early 1970s, served as Head of Cultural Affairs at Radio Sierra Leone. He later held academic appointments as a guest professor at the University of the Philippines in 1975 and as a lecturer at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria.

Cheney-Coker’s poetry-including Concerto for an Exile (1973), The Graveyard Also Has Teeth (1980), The Blood in the Desert’s Eyes (1990), and Stone Child and Other Poems (2008)-has left a lasting mark on African literature. His international breakthrough came with the novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Africa Region in 1991 and is now considered a landmark of postcolonial fiction. Cheney-Coker’s work is noted for its fusion of French and Latin American literary influences with the lived realities of exile, identity, and the history of West Africa.

Returning to Sierra Leone in the early 1990s after more than a decade abroad, Cheney-Coker became editor of the progressive newspaper Vanguard in Freetown. Following the 1997 military coup, he was targeted as a dissident and forced into exile, living in Guinea, England, Las Vegas (as part of the Cities of Asylum program), and New York, where he taught creative writing at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He was also a Feuchtwanger Fellow at Villa Aurora in California.

Cheney-Coker has received numerous honors, including the Fonlon-Nichols Award from the African Literature Association and a fellowship from the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His most recent poetry collection, Stone Child and Other Poems (2008), explores the plight of children in Sierra Leone. He now divides his time between Sierra Leone and the United States and remains a vital voice in contemporary African literature.