About
Nathan Kweku John is a second-year MFA poet at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. As such, his transnational West African upbringing heavily influences his aesthetic, as he endeavors to uncover poetic connections across diasporic time and space. He is the second-place winner of Furious Flower’s 2020 poetry contest, finalist of the 2020 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, and has work published and forthcoming in The Common, Obsidian, Sunu Journal, and elsewhere. Nathan is presently working on his first poetry manuscript entitled Saltwater Demands a Psalm, where he investigates colonization, black mourning, black boyhood, and especially, the spiritual consequences of climate change in West Africa.
