“Innovative work by [an] emerging scholar…”

~Editors of Modernism/Modernity Print +

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu is a scholar of poetry and poetics who works across the literatures and cultures of Africa and the Black diaspora. She is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and received her PhD from Cornell University's Department of Literatures in English. She was born in Ghana, grew up in New England, and spent five years in New York before moving to St. Louis, MO.

Her first academic monograph, African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Her academic writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of the African Literature Association, Research in African Literatures, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, The Black Scholar, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Reviews in DH, and the edited volume African Literature in Transition (Cambridge University Press). Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the African Poetry Book Fund (through a re-grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Center for Race and Ethnicity, and Cornell University's Olin Library.

She is the founder and director of the Global Poetics Project, an experimental archive, digital humanities project, co-working space, and production studio that uses digital storytelling, mapping, and network modeling to study poetry.

She is currently working on two projects. The first, her second academic monograph, African Poetry in the Digital Age, follows African and Black diasporic poets online from the early internet to the age of generative AI, ranging across born-digital art, videopoetry, social media poetics, online literary festivals, and digital archives. The second is a collection of poems.