M. Nzadi Keita

Credit: Matthew Hamilton

About Nzadi

Poet, essayist, and scholar M. Nzadi Keita is a first-generation urban northerner. She is the author of three poetry collections. Migration Letters: Poems (Beacon, 2024) centers her upbringing in Black working-class Philadelphia, originally Lenapehoking land.  Brief Evidence of Heaven: Poems from the life of Anna Murray Douglass —a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Prize—uses persona to shed light on free-born, illiterate abolitionist, Anna Murray Douglass, Frederick Douglass’s first wife.  Birthmarks springs from recorded oral histories.

Keita is a Cave Canem alumna.  Her poems appear in anthologies including Signed, Sealed, Delivered: A Motown Poetry Revue, A Face to Meet the Faces: A Persona Poetry Anthology, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. Obsidian, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard, MELUS, and other journals have also published her work. Her prose publications include Women, Culture, and The Sixties and the journal, About Place.

In service to the poetry community, Keita was an advisor to the award-winning film, “BadddDDD Sonia Sanchez” and a consultant with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. Her literary and community adventures have earned grants and awards from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, Yaddo Arts Center, the Leeway Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Pew Center for the Arts.  She has collaborated with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, WHYY-TV/ Philadelphia, the Rosenbach Museum, Moonstone Arts Center, and other initiatives.   For many years, she taught creative writing, Africana Studies, and American literature as a Professor of English at Ursinus College.