Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent.
Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published b
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Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent.
Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published by Graywolf Press in 2023. The début collection was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award. In 2024, Saltwater also received a gold medal Florida Book Award, and the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His work interrogates the intersections of West African spirituality, ethnomusicology, cultural expression, and poetics to appreciate the legacies of Black literature on a global scale.
He has worked as a teaching artist for the Detroit-based literary nonprofit Inside Out Literary Arts and lectured in English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. Abimbola is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is also the Poet Laureate of El Segundo, CA and a 2025 Academy of American Poets National Poet Laureate Fellow.
