We are delighted to announce that fiction writer Samuel Kọ́láwọlé will join the creative writing faculty as an assistant professor in the English Department at Penn State this fall!

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel The Road to Salt Sea is forthcoming from Amistad/Harper Collins. Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. His work has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Washington Square Review, Consequence, and is forthcoming from Harvard Review.

His fiction has been supported with fellowships, residencies, and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Centre, International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Clarion West Writers Workshop, Wellstone Centre in the Redwoods California, and Island Institute.

Kọ́láwọlé studied at the University of Ibadan and holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing with distinction from Rhodes University, South Africa. A graduate of the MFA in Writing and Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, he returned to VCFA to join the MFA in Writing faculty. He is working towards his Ph.D. at Georgia State University.

Here’s a sampling of Kọ́láwọlé’s writing, a story entitled “Sweet sweet strawberry taste,” published in AGNI (April 2019).

Welcome, Samuel!