The Adinkra Poetry Prize, which began in 2022 as part of a public humanities project conceived through the UNH Summer Institute in Public Humanities by Prof. Rachel Afia Ansong, has become a grounding force for many Ghanaian poets. Through its carefully crafted workshops, publications, and residency programs, the prize has offered a space where writers can deepen their craft while engaging the rich heritage of Adinkra symbols. Each year, one of the 200+ symbols is chosen, and poets are invited to respond with original work, braiding personal meaning with cultural memory and, in the process, helping to shape an international community of Ghanaian writers both at home and across the diaspora.
Christopher Armoh, the 2025 winner of the prize, meets here in conversation with Dr. Tryphena Yeboah as two writers shaped by community, curiosity, and a quiet devotion to language. Christopher brings the growing voice of a poet whose work is finding its way into classrooms and circles of readers, while Dr. Yeboah carries the seasoned perspective of a writer whose poems, stories, and essays have traveled widely.
Dr. Yeboah is the author of A Mouthful of Home, a winner of the Narrative Prize, a recent Caine Prize finalist, and a Pushcart honoree. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, Lit Hub, and many other spaces where attentive writing is cherished. She teaches at Tennessee Wesleyan University, guiding new writers as both a professor and Director of Creative Writing.
CA: Picking up from our earlier conversation about pressure, trust, and the small rituals that keep us writing…Your description of that tug between fear and freedom, the pressure to outdo yourself, the small mercies of starting slow, and the quiet work of returning to language on your own terms, feels deeply grounding. It also turns my attention to how fluidly your work moves between forms: poetry, short stories, or essays, with each form holding its own character and gravity.
For instance, your poems like Surge and The Good Years & Other Poems feel very different in weight compared to your short story The Dishwashing Woman (a personal favorite of mine!). Yet there’s a shared pulse running through all of them. How do you decide whether an idea wants to become a poem, a short story, or an essay? And please! share your writing process, what are your rituals?
TY: Thanks for taking the time to read my work, Christopher. I wrote “Surge” after a dear professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln brought me a care basket when I had Covid. I remember standing on the other side of my apartment door, holding the package she had just delivered, and watching her through the glass partition that separated us. I just stood there and wept. I was sick and lonesome and felt so moved by her kindness. “The Good Years” and “Tethered” are poems I wrote for my husband, Daniel, a few months before we got married. During that season, I thought a lot about our love story through the years–how we were together and then apart for years, and by some beautiful and unexpected intervention, ended up in each other’s lives again. I was floored by the sequence of events and the kindness that led to our reconciliation. I was also really trying to grapple with all the fragments of our past and present lives, and my fear around change and newness. I haven't quite given much thought to why I choose one genre over the other. I simply sit down and decide I want to write a story or a poem.
I suppose that for my poems, there is a level of emotional investment in them. Many of them are grounded in lived experiences as well as keen observations. When something happens to me or I witness something that confounds and moves me, journaling and poetry are my first mode of engaging with it. I have no idea why. Perhaps the genre allows for a level of intimacy that I’m yet to find in fiction? Ah I don’t know! Although, of course, several of my short stories are also influenced by things I’ve seen or heard. The premise of “The Dishwashing Woman” was inspired by an experience my late mother-in-law shared with me about her workplace. When I write stories, I am most interested in character interiority, which one can say has a lot to do with intimacy as well. I want to move past the exterior, to break walls and get to the heart of why people do what they do, to heighten their inward contradictions as much as possible, to develop characters who are so deeply layered and complex that we can’t just pin them down as one thing. And for my poems, I don’t get to hide behind characters. I’m simply saying, Look at all the wild ways I contradict myself, all the shocking ways I fail as a human. I must say that I am working hard to move away from solely focusing on the confessional aspect of poetry and turn my gaze outward. There is so much to see and write outside of oneself.
As for rituals, what has been consistent in my practice is putting off the task of writing for as long as possible. A typical writing session almost always begins with an urgent need to clean my office and arrange things on my desk, color-coordinate my sticky notes, write and send out overdue emails, organize my paper files, dust my fake plants, walk around my office looking for something else to do, and at last, when I have managed to get through all the distractions, I close the door in dismay, sit in my chair, and stare at a blank page.
CA: Your honesty is so refreshing! I chuckled quietly at that image of you dusting fake plants. It’s comforting to know even our most disciplined writers have their own rituals of avoidance. I used to beat myself up over blank pages when I’d finally carve out time to write, but I’m learning to give myself a little more grace these days.
I appreciate what you said about poems being a place where you can’t hide behind characters. That feels so true, and so vulnerable! When you sit down to write something drawn directly from your own life, how do you decide what to keep for yourself and what to offer to the pages?
TY: When I am writing, I rarely think about or make those decisions. I put everything down on the page. I think the revision phase is where I consider those matters, especially after stepping away from the work for a while. I return to it with fresh eyes and sensibility. I really don’t think too much about it when it’s fiction or poetry. It’s hard for one to tell where the imagined stuff ends and the real stuff begins. They all bleed into each other. As I’ve gotten older, I am particularly mindful of how much I reveal in my nonfiction, especially when it involves my personal relationships and also specific details about my life. I want to be intentional and purposeful when I choose what to write and share in the public domain. I also want to be vulnerable, honest, and effective in what I wish to convey. In the end, I want to create work that is compelling and evocative, and as much as I can, I want to do that in a way that is beautiful, honest, and meaningful. Here’s a quote from Rita Dove that I think about when I consider this subject: “Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I'm like, No one's interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I'm reading.”
CA: It resonates with me the way you describe that blend of honesty and restraint—how the page becomes a place where the real and the imagined overlap, and how revision helps you decide what belongs to you and what you’re willing to let into the light. It reminds me of something you once said in an interview with Darlington Chibueze Anuonye about fearing that you’re writing the same story in a hundred different ways. I love that tension: the ordinary transformed and made to open conversations. How do you keep returning to familiar ground without it becoming repetitive?
TY: The surprise here is your note that my work isn't repetitive because I think it is, or maybe that’s just what I tell myself. I suppose one can write about the complexity of mother-daughter relationships in a myriad of ways, and the same goes for grief, love, beauty, and evil. I am certainly interested in exploring the human condition and I find that I return to the same themes over and over again. It’s a fruitful obsession, I think? The depths of loss are inexhaustible. A world of multitudes and possibilities exist in the emotions of fear, rage, betrayal, hope. More than working against repetition, I want to challenge myself to think differently about the themes I return to, to go deeper into a range of impulses, to consider all the sides of human frailty and failure. When I approach the page with more curiosity and questions, my writing is guided by a genuine inquiry and that’s very exciting for me as a writer. I want to know how far I can push relational boundaries until forgiveness seems nearly impossible. I want to know how a woman’s experience of sorrow can descend into madness. I want to know just how much damage can unfold years after a seemingly harmless childhood incident. I actually want to see how these stories take shape and end. I want to surprise myself first. So, I make it up as I go, thinking about the different rooms and situations I can place my characters in. I recently had a conversation with Richard Bausch and he talked about how stories suggest themselves in situation and context, how he wants to bring forth news of the inner landscape of a character and what they’re living through at a particular moment. I fear this may be a longwinded way of saying that while I hope to stay faithful to these thematic preoccupations, I don’t want to get bored or grow indifferent. I want to stay curious. I want to keep imagining different situations and stakes to see what emerges for the characters, and really, for me.
CA:So many Ghanaian writers, both at home and in the diaspora, are producing remarkable work, yet much of it ends up scattered across journals or published on other continents, which makes access a real challenge. I remember, for instance, trying to read the poetry of Gladys May Casely Hayford back in school and realizing how little of it was available.
It makes me wonder what the way forward might look like. How do we make sure Ghanaian literary works are properly archived and accessible to readers today, while also preserving them for the generations to come? We do have powerful efforts taking shape—Sylvia Arthur’s Library of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD), the E-Ananse Library, the Museum of African Poetry, the Creatives Project of Ghana, and the Writers’ Project of Ghana, to name a few. But what more can we do, as writers and readers, to support and sustain these spaces so that Ghanaian voices continue to grow, not just endure?
TY: Oh, I really don’t know, Christopher. My worry with questions of this nature is the fear that I must know and have something profound to say that contributes to the conversation of literary growth at the national level. And I really do think these groups you’ve mentioned are doing incredible and impactful work. I haven’t thought about what more we can do beyond the important effort towards cultivating these literary communities, making space for reading, generating and sharing work–all of which these groups (including your book club) are doing an excellent job at.
CA:That’s very true and I appreciate your honesty about this question. On a lighter note, I’m always seeking good recommendations for my book club, Boys&Books and I’d love to know what you are reading right now or which books have stayed with you recently. And, are you working on anything at the moment?
TY: Book clubs are great! As a matter of fact, the books I’ve read recently were all recommended to me by friends and book club buddies. Last month, my book club read Jojo Moyes’ The Giver of Stars and I just could not put it down. I picked up The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali after a raving review by Amoafoa Smart. I was not at all disappointed. I enjoyed the theme of female friendships and empowerment, family dynamics, and social injustice in both books. A compelling read for boys, eh? I’ve also just finished reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake–a brilliant book about the immigrant experience. Ama Asantewa’s short story collection, Someone Birthed them Broken, is next on my radar! And of course, I am a big fan of the African Poetry Book Fund. I look forward to the chapbook boxsets each year and can’t recommend it enough.
I wish I could say that I am writing every day. But I’ve just completed my first year of teaching and still feel like I can barely come up for air. I’ve been told that it gets better, that things would start to settle down in my third year and I won’t always feel stretched thin. I can’t get out this image shared by my colleague about what it looks like to navigate a busy season of this kind. She said it’s as if you have five pots on the stove and you’re working hard to keep them all from boiling over. Just when you’re done with one, and are ready to catch your breath, another threatens to bubble to the surface. So you’re caught in this dance of boiling pots, trying not to burn yourself or the house down. I went a long time believing I couldn't possibly turn down the heat, that things have got to stay in whatever raging momentum they come and that I must give myself over to the incessant demands until I can’t anymore. But that’s not true. It is simply not sustainable. So, these days, I am working on being intentional about what I give my yes to. I am creating manageable to-do lists so I do not have to beat myself up when I’m unable to accomplish everything I set out to do. I am learning to practice stillness although I am failing at it. I am journaling and writing letters to my friends and reading. Lots and lots of reading. I know the conditions are always impossible. I understand the stakes. There is the giant world of publishing and all it takes to launch yourself into that world. I know, and I try not to fret over it too much. I think as long as I am still reaching for words and immersed in the world of teaching, language, and storytelling, it’ll be okay. And, dare I say, it’ll be enough.
CA: It’ll definitely be enough! And I love that you’re being practically mindful about everything you’re doing. Thank you so much for sharing these words and the books you’ve read and the ones on your TBR list. I’m definitely putting them on our TBR list! My book club read Someone Birthed Them Broken by Ama Asantewa Diaka in April and I’ve been blessed to join a few of the Tampered Press reading parties and I wish that lots and lots of people would read this book, especially Ghanaians!
CA: Just to wrap this conversation up, you’ve been named a judge of the 2026 Adinkra Poetry Prize alongside Dr. Kwabena Opoku Agyemang. Congratulations! I’m curious to know, what does this responsibility mean to you and what are some of your expectations for the prize?
TY: Thank you, Christopher. I feel really honored to be part of this. I’ve been following the Adinkra Prize since Afia started the project in 2022, and it’s been so amazing to witness its growth and impact on the literary community in Ghana. It’s an opportunity that creates space for writers to connect, generate work and share it with others, and a wonderful way to encourage and celebrate Ghanaian voices. I’m just humbled to be part of this and more importantly, eager to read this year’s submissions and fellowship with writers. I really just feel like I’m showing up at a cool gathering with people who are passionate about language and artistic expression, and I get to sit at the table and be part of the conversation and creative process. There’s something very grounding about cultivating and nurturing a community with writers.
CA: Dr. Yeboah, it’s been such a gift to sit with you and hear your reflections. Your words about showing up at the table, being part of the conversation and creative process, and the grounding nature of nurturing a community with writers resonate deeply. I’m grateful for your honesty, your patience, and the time you’ve shared throughout this conversation. As you step into your role judging the 2026 Adinkra Poetry Prize alongside Dr. Kwabena Opoku Agyemang, I can’t wait to see the work that finds its way to you and the work you’ll guide into the world.
To every Ghanaian writer at home and in the diaspora, I hope you send your poems, your stubborn drafts, or your brave beginnings to the Adinkra Poetry Prize. This year’s symbol, Nyame biribi wɔ soro ma me nsa nka, reminds us of home and of our leaning on God. From now until January 30th, 2026, let your work travel. Sign up for the workshops if you can. Polish what needs polishing. Take the chance. I hope you win, and I look forward to reading what you create. All the best!