Adebe DeRango-Adem
editor, author, sensitivity reader
Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer whose work has been published in sources such as The Claremont Review, CV2, the Toronto Star, Room Magazine, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is a former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka to produce her debut book of poems, Ex Nihilo (Frontenac House, 2010), a text that considers how art can respond to the annihilation of particular identities struggling to exist in an impossibly post-racial world. In the same year of its publication, Ex Nihilo became a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the world’s largest prize for writers under thirty.
DeRango-Adem is also the editor, with Andrea Thompson, of Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications, 2010). Her second poetry collection, Terra Incognita (Inanna Publications, 2015), was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Poems from the collection were also longlisted for the 2016 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize, judged by poet Claudia Rankine. Her third collection, The Unmooring, was published in 2018 by Mansfield Press. A poem from the collection was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets.
Adebe served as the 2019-20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her poem “Vox Genus / Provectus” was selected by poet Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest, and features in her fourth collection, Vox Humana (Book*hug Press, 2022), winner of the 2023 Raymond Souster Award. Selections from Vox were developed into an original choral composition during her 2023 residency with the Choral Creation Lab, in collaboration with fellow resident composers and the Amadeus Choir of Toronto.
“Aria Apocalypta,” a poem from her current/in-progress work, was longlisted for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Her poem “Song of Sheba” can be found on Toronto buses, trains, and streetcars as of 2024, thanks to the Poems in Passage program (in collaboration with the TTC).
adebederangoadem.com 