Remi Raji

Aderemi Raji-Oyelade is a Nigerian poet, writing in English. He is popularly known by his pen name, Remi Raji.^[1]

A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions, among them Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cambridge University, UK, Raji has had scholarly essays published in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. He has read his poems widely in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm, Sweden.

His volumes of poetry include Webs of Remembrance (2001), Shuttlesongs America: A poetic guided tour (2003), Lovesong for My Wasteland (2005), Gather My Blood Rivers of Song (2009) and "Sea of My Mind" (2013). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Croatian and Hungarian. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar to Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Remi Raji was elected as the Publicity Secretary of the Oyo State chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors in 1989. His second elective position was as Vice Chair of the Association in 1997. He became the substantive Chairman of the Association from 1998 to 2000, at the election of Dr. Wale Okediran to the national executive committee of ANA. Raji served as the Year 2000 Editor of the ANA REVIEW, the official journal of the association. On December 3, 2011, during the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the founding of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Remi Raji was elected as the eleventh President of ANA.

Raji was the National Coordinator of the resuscitated Nigerian PEN Centre in 1999 before he was elected as the Secretary of the Centre, a position he held till February, 2010. During this period, Raji facilitated international workshops and strategic meetings of African PEN Centres within Africa and in Europe. He was unanimously elected as the first Coordinating Secretary of PAN, the Congress of PEN African Centres, at a special meeting of the group on November 22, 2003 in Mexico City.

At his university, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, the Professor of English and African Literatures and Creative Writing has served in many administrative capacities which culminated in his appointment as the Head of the Department of English in 2011. Over a year after that substantive position, he was elected as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Bibliography

• A Harvest of Laughters, 1997, joint-winner of the Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize and winner of the Association of West African Young Writers' VOCA Award for Best First Published Book
• Webs of Remembrance, 2001
• Shuttlesongs America: A Poetic Guided Tour, 2001–2003
• Lovesong for My Wasteland, 2005
• Gather My Blood Rivers of Song, 2009.
• "Sea of My Mind", 2013.

References

External links

• Remi Raji's Selected Poems in the Dublin Quarterly.
• Sule E. Egya, The Nationalist Imagination in Remi Raji's Lovesong for My Wasteland, in Research in African Literatures, Winter 2007, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 111–126.