About

Thanks for stopping by my sweet old home! 🙂

You can check out my new website tryphenayeboah.com ❤

Hello!

I am a writer from Ghana. My debut chapbook, A Mouthful of Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the APBF New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. I hold an MFA from Chapman University and an MA in Development Communications from the Ghana Institute of Journalism.

In a lot of ways, I have made my writing a practice of seeking, witnessing, and, especially meaningful to me, a means to learn more about myself, my relationships with others, and our world. There are all kinds of possibilities with a commitment like this—but the most rewarding outcome for me is the risky move towards finding out what I don’t know, even what I don’t wish to know and accept about myself.

A writing style I admire (and hope to imitate well) is an approach that makes the reader actually see the story; that a text can be so clean, detailed, and intimate such that one only has to start reading to find themselves invested in its world. I think it’s a challenging effect to achieve, especially when it comes to removing distractions in language & structure. But I hope I can come a little close to creating work that is vibrant, alive, and with a promising element of belief.

My work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Commonwealth Writers, Lit Hub, among others. I have book reviews featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Tab Journal and Libro Mobile. Currently I live in Lincoln, where I’m a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska. I am happily specializing in Creative Writing and nervously teaching First-Year Composition.

Writing was the only work I did that was for myself and by myself. In the process, one exercises sovereignty in a special way. All sensibilities are engaged, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially. While I’m writing, all of my experience is vital and useful and possibly important. It may not appear in the work, but it is valuable. Writing gives me what I think dancers have on stage  in their relation to gravity and space and time. It is energetic and balanced, fluid and in repose. And there is always the possibility of growth; I could never hit the highest note so I’d never have to stop.

Toni Morrison, in conversation with Thomas LeClair/March 20, 1981