Syl Cheney-Coker

Poet and novelist Syl Cheney-Coker was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon. Both his poetry and fiction explore his identity as a Creole, the history of Sierra Leone, community, and exile. In an interview for Newswatch, he cited the “agony” of his country as one of his primary subjects.

Cheney-Coker’s poetry collections include Stone Child and other poems (2008), a collection in which he explores the plight of children in Sierra Leone, The Blood in the Desert’s Eyes (1990), The Graveyard Also Has Teeth with Concerto for an Exile (1980), and Concerto for an Exile (1973). His novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) won the 1991 Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa Region. He has also received the Fonlon-Nichols Award from the African Literature Association.

Cheney-Coker has taught at universities in the Philippines, Nigeria, and Las Vegas, Nevada, and was a fellow at the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In the late 1980s, he edited the Vanguard, a newspaper in Freetown, Sierra Leone. After a 1997 military coup, he left Sierra Leone; he has since returned and divides his time between the United States and Sierra Leone.