Bhion Achimba
This academic year I am curating a series of conversations, workshops, and symposia across the United States on Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome in contemporary poetry.
The role feels like a homecoming of sorts—a convergence of my creative and critical preoccupations. I am a poet and scholar whose practice braids together myth and memory, the personal and the political, one especially invested in probing the experience of modern exile and displacement.
I was drawn to this curatorial opportunity because of my work on Winter with Ovid, a book-length sequence of poems in progress. Winter with Ovid reimagines the Roman poet Ovid as a refugee in America. The project takes Ovid’s exile from Rome by Augustus as a framework for examining migration, deracination, and the fragile architectures of belonging. Tristia and Ex Ponto have always read to me as early incarnations of the asylum story—works that capture the refugee’s loss and yearning for his homeland while grappling with a fractured, suspended identity. The ancient registers of displacement Ovid evokes in his exilic writings still reverberate in the current moment in the United States and elsewhere, when national borders are tightening and the very idea of citizenship feels increasingly conditional.
Ovid’s exile is not only relevant in geopolitical terms; it is deeply personal. In 2019, I arrived in the United States as a refugee, fleeing Nigeria’s anti-gay laws. Winter with Ovid is my way of conversing across time with another exiled writer, mapping the long continuum between mythic and modern forms of banishment. At its core, the collection investigates how language allows the migrant or refugee to invent and articulate a provisional self in order to remain visible in the world.
The events planned for this year aim to offer the society’s members a closer look at how contemporary Black poets are translating material from ancient Greek and Roman societies into our fractured space-times. In recently published collections, Afro-diasporic poets such as Desiree C. Bailey, Ishion Hutchinson, and Gustav Parker Hibbett have reanimated mythological figures like Icarus, Orpheus, and Venus, moving them across geographies and histories. From Nicole Sealey’s “Imagine Sisyphus Happy,” in which the mythological laborer pauses to dream of joy, to Jericho Brown’s “Ganymede,” where Zeus’ cupbearer is reborn as a figure of beauty and resistance within the racial history of America, these poets rebuild narrative from the ruins of history. They restore body and agency to figures that can too easily be reduced to mere symbols of punishment or desire.
READS will lay the groundwork for these explorations. The workshop series aims to introduce Eos members to influential works from the African diaspora and to prepare them to incorporate these works into their curricula. For that reason, I have selected Mother Love, the extraordinary 1995 poetry collection by former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, as the next text in the series.
Mother Love reimagines the myth of Demeter and Persephone as a story of Black American motherhood and daughterhood—a narrative defined as much by love and loss as by the necessary letting go at the heart of every coming-of-age story. The workshop will draw on Dove’s work alongside the critical writings of poet and scholar Dr. Joy Priest to consider how the lyric form carries the Black child through the racially fraught stages of development. I invite Eos members to attend this instance of READS during the upcoming 2026 SCS Annual Meeting. Further logistical details are forthcoming.
More updates will follow as the year unfolds. I look forward to meeting other members of the society, and to expanding this conversation further.
Born in rural southeastern Nigeria, Bhion Achimba is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and a Research Associate in Classics at Brown University. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Frontier Poetry, Guernica, and Poetry Magazine. Awarded the 2023 Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation, he is completing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.