Rasaq Malik Gbolahan is a Nigerian poet, performer, translator, editor, and essayist. He is the winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry for his manuscript, The Origin of Wounds (December, 2025) selected by Kaveh Bassiri. He is a graduate of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. A founding editor-in-chief of Agbowó, he is a cofounder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ́, a digital journal devoted to publishing literary work written in the Yorùbá language. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Home In This Land (Akashic Books, 2018) selected for Chapbook Box edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, and The Other Names of Grief (Konya Shamsrumi, 2021), as well as the co-editor of African Urban Echoes (Griots Lounge, 2025) and Àtẹ́lẹwọ́ Pélébé (2018).

 

His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in journals such as POETRY, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Nation, African American Review, Blackbird, Beloit, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, LitHub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Rattle, Saraba, Sentinel, Salt Hill, Spillway, Stand, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. 

 

He received Honorable Mention in 2015 Best of the Net for his poem “Elegy,” published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017, and was a finalist for Sillerman First Book for African Poets in 2018. He is presently working on a translation project and a collection of Yoruba short stories.