I was delighted when talented young Nigerian poet Ifésinàchi Nwadike (author of How Morning Remembers the Night, shortlisted for the 2020 Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize) received a Chancellors International Scholarship to take up his PhD work under my supervision at the University of Warwick. Ifésinàchi's research project, “Atlantic Poetics and Hydro-Imaginaries in Nigerian Poetry," interrogates how Nigerian poets use water—rivers, oceans, floods—as metaphors for memory, trauma, displacement, and colonial legacy. This project emerges from Ifésinàchi's intellectual engagement with environmental and decolonial thought, as well as his lived experience in a community where water is both a life-source and a threat. It is a project that seeks to amplify marginal voices and contribute to global debates on literature, ecology, and postcolonial identity.

Ifésináchi also is an eloquent and prolific commentator on contemporary Nigerian poetry. You can read a review of his collection here and an interview here.

Unfortunately, the hostile environment faced by overseas students immigrating to the UK for study, combined with Ifésinàchi's position as a member of a low-income community and a first-generation graduate student, are presenting a set of financial obstacles that compel us to reach out for support.

Despite obtaining a competitive Doctoral Access Bursary of £4,000 from my institution, which doesn't quite cover the grotesquely punitive £4,500 'Immigration Health Surcharge' (IHS) that the UK Home Office demands Ifésinàchi pay up front, he faces a shortfall of a further £2,000: £1000 pounds for his visa application fee, £500 to make up the IHS shortfall from the Doctoral Access Bursary, and a further £500 for his first month accommodation and movement expenses until he begins receiving his stipend.

Can you help? While it has been a joy to work with several brilliant PhD students on ecopoetics-related research, aims to uncenter ecopoetics from its Anglo-American and Eurocentric coordinates remain aspirational if we can't actually help someone in Ifésinàchi's position enter the field. Any amount will make a difference!

We promise to reward contributors with small press joy and good news from ecopoetics@warwick over the months and years to come. With much thanks in advance!