SLU Writers Series Presents: Viebranz Visiting Professor, Dr. Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe is the 2022-2023 Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing.



He is the author of the novels Arrows of Rain (Heinemann, 2000) and Foreign Gods, Inc. (Soho Press, 2014). Playwright and Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka described Arrows of Rain as “[h]ighly evocative,” while Kirkus called Ndibe’s debut a “Kafkaesque, imaginative novel of great necessity and power.” Of Ndibe’s second novel, writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o said that Foreign Gods, Inc. “reads like the narrative of a taxi-driving Faust in modern Nigeria and America,” adding that with its “humorous debunking of religious hypocrisy and rancid materialism, it teems with characters and situations that make you laugh in order not to cry.” Ndibe is also the author of the memoir Never Look an American in the Eye (Soho Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for Nonfiction and a Hartford Courant Best Book of the Year. An awardwinning journalist, Ndibe has taught as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Lagos, and as a visiting professor at Brown University, Connecticut College, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Trinity College, Connecticut, and previously at ˜ ˜ St. Lawrence as the 2017-2018 Viebranz Visiting Professor.

Photo by Holly Williams