 Happy New Year, Sprinngers! It is with great joy that we welcome you to 2024! We are excited that you made it and thrilled about all the progress you will make this year and the exciting opportunities we have lined up for you at SprinNG throughout the year. Also, we are happy to announce that we are expanding the SprinNG Writing Fellowship to another African country this year. Please watch out for the announcement soon on our social media platforms and newsletter.  We are open for submissions until March 30, 2024. We are accepting submissions in all genres from African writers. You may submit between 1-2 pieces (of the same or different genres) for this period only. You may submit Poetry, Fiction (Flash fiction, Short Stories, etc.), or Creative Nonfiction (Essays, Book Reviews, etc.). Writers can submit on a theme(s) of their choice. Work(s) submitted should not have been published elsewhere (on a literary platform, personal blog, or social media page).  Application for the SprinNG Writing Fellowship (Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa) opens on January 15, 2024. Click HERE for more information. The SprinNG Writing Fellowship (SWF) is an intensive 6-week online mentorship program for developing Nigerian and Ghanaian writers with great potential and willingness to learn and develop their craft.
This fellowship focuses on Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Book Review, Play/Drama, and Blogging. During the 6 weeks, mentees will be in contact with their mentors, sending them their works and getting reviews and commentaries. Mentors and mentees will aim to work on at least 1 piece of writing in their select genre per week. The SprinNG Creative Writing Fellowship is only open to writers who have not published a book before (eBook/hardcopy). The medium of communication between the mentors and mentees throughout this program will be via email, phone calls, WhatsApp, and text messages. All mentees will be provided weekly N500/¢10/R29 airtime during the program. Dear SprinNGers, It has been a beautiful, memorable, and tremendous year of success at SprinNG, and again, we are grateful for another opportunity to reflect on this year’s journey and share our progress and accomplishments with you. In May 2023, SprinNG clocked seven (7) years, and we were excited to celebrate an incredible and significant milestone. Not only are we grateful for the continuous dedication and resources to make such a remarkable impact within the Nigerian literary community, but we are also thrilled about the inclusive and growing community we are building in Africa, one expansion at a time. Additionally, we are immensely thankful to our literary friends, collaborators, organizations, book community of mentors and fellows, readers, and Rovingheights for their amazing and invaluable support in helping us achieve our mission and set goals for every new year. While we will be rebranding and restructuring in 2024, we are excited about all the great work we will do and what is to come. Most importantly, we remain focused and committed to promoting and revitalizing African literature and developing its young writers through our key projects and other new opportunities. In this regard, we are always open to donations and partnerships that would help further our impact and equip us with all the necessary resources to achieve our goals. Here is the summary of our successes in 2023 and hopes for next year: SprinNG Fellowships  The SprinNG Writing Fellowship: This year, we took a giant leap, and in collaboration with Botsotso, we expanded the SprinNG Writing Fellowship to South Africa, making it our second expansion to an African country. In line with this, we witnessed a massive increase in the number of applications we received for the 2023 SprinNG Writing Fellowship—an intensive 6-week online one-on-one mentorship program for young African writers with great potential and willingness to learn and develop their craft. Unlike last year, when we received 801 applications and paired 44 mentees with 40 mentors, we received 1,163 applications from Nigerian, Ghanaian, and South African writers this year. Remarkably, 79 contemporary writers accepted to serve as mentors for the program. Thus, we were able to accept 77 mentees into the fellowship and paired them with 79 mentors, 65 of whom completed the fellowship. We remain grateful to the team at Botsotso for their support in helping us to experience a smooth expansion to South Africa and to the CGWS team in Ghana for their yearly and consistent support. While we anticipate another expansion in 2024, here is the statistical documentation of our growth for the SprinNG Writing fellowship since we started:
The 2024 SprinNG Writing Fellowship application will open between January and April 15. We encourage potential applicants to visit www.sprinng.org/writing-fellowship and follow our social media accounts for further announcements. The SprinNG Advantage Program (SAP): In August, we launched the SprinNG Advantage Program—a free and two-step comprehensive application support system for young African writers interested in pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. This year, we accepted eleven (11) participants into the program's first step, five (5) of whom successfully made it into the MFA Academy—the second and final step and were encouraged to apply to the MFA program of at least three (3) universities. For more information about the program, visit https://www.sprinng.org/advantage-program to download and read the brochure.  The SprinNG Advancement Fellowship (SAF): For the 2023 SprinNG Advancement Fellowship—a 3-week program that helps individuals develop career content and improve their professional and communication skills to attain academic and career goals, we accepted 15 Fellows into the program, ten (10) of whom successfully finished. Most importantly, this year, we transformed the SprinNG Advancement Fellowship from an independent project/paid service to a program under the SprinNG Advantage Program. Please click here for more information about the SprinNG Advancement Fellowship. SprinNG Publications and Social Media: Although, like last year, we published 52 literary pieces on our website, including poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and interviews, we recorded an increase in our engagements. This year, we had 502 comments, 24,449 unique views, and 54,717 page visits. We also recorded monumental growth and engagements on our social media pages. You can follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram @sprinnglm, and YouTube @SprinNGLM. We are happy to announce that we will be accepting submissions for the 2024 Publication Year. Submission opens on Monday, January 1, 2024. For more information on submission guidelines and how to submit, visit www.sprinng.org/submit-to-us. In addition, we will publish the 2023 SprinNG Writing Fellowship Anthology and brilliant pieces by some of our 2023 SprinNG Fellows next year. We encourage you to sign up for our newsletters for publication updates and literary opportunities at SprinNG and within the African literary community. We also encourage you to explore our SprinNG Lit page, which has over 400 literary websites to which you can submit your works to. SprinNG Events: As part of this year’s debut of the SprinNG Advantage Program, we held two successful Zoom events on how to apply for an MFA program in July and August, respectively. The events were facilitated by SprinNG Co-founder Kanyinsola Olorunnisola and award-winning writer and poet I. S. Jones. We recorded an attendance of 224 people for the events, and we are exceedingly grateful to our facilitators and panelists, Ucheoma Onwutuebe, Iquo DianaAbasi, Adedayo Agarau, and Nkiacha Atemnkeng, for their presence and invaluable insights. Our MFA Orientation Series event recordings are available on our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@SprinNGLM. We plan to host more informative and engaging events in 2024. SprinNG Contests  The SprinNG Annual Poetry Contest: This year, 2,116 writers submitted to the SprinNG Annual Poetry Contest. We thank all our contestants for participating and congratulate the winner, Adedoyin Kayode Olamide, and the runner-ups, Okafor Michael Onyebuchi (first runner-up) and Chinemerem Prince Nwankwo (second runner-up). We appreciate our judges, Adamu Yahuza, Taiwo Hassan, Omolola Okunlola, Bryan Okwesili, Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, and Modester Alo, for their hard work and thoroughness in selecting the finalists for this year’s contest. You can read the shortlisted poems here. The 2024 SprinNG Annual Poetry Contest will open for submission on March 1 and will close on June 30, 2024. Eligibility requirements and submission instructions are available on our website: www.sprinng.org/annual-poetry-contest. The SprinNG Women Authors Prize (SWAP): For three consecutive years, we have accepted submissions for the SprinNG Women Authors Prize—a prize dedicated to promoting and celebrating literary works by female Nigerian authors, and between 2020-2023, we have had four exceptional winning books. This year, we did not accept submissions for the SprinNG Women Authors Prize (SWAP) and will be moving forward with other programs to expand our mission of promoting African writers. For more details about the SprinNG Women Authors Prize and our past winners, please visit www.sprinng.org/swap. The Nigerian Writers Database: After four (4) years of managing the Nigerian Writers Database, leading it to host over 500 writers, we have decided to pursue a more inclusive program structure dedicated to African writers. In 2024, the Nigerian Writers Database managed by SprinNG will no longer be accessible. We encourage writers to explore other opportunities to keep their biographies updated and their work visible, such as through publications on other literary platforms, LinkedIn pages, and personal blogs. We appreciate everyone who has published their biographies on the website and look forward to a phenomenal and momentous new year!
Ebukun G. Ogunyemi | SprinNG’s Director  The winner of the October giveaway is Flourish This giveaway is courtesy of SprinNG and Roving Heights Bookstore.
Instruction: Read the publications on the SprinNG website for the month and write a comment on 2 or more of the publications. Add your name and email address when filling in the comment box (email addresses will not be made public). We encourage that your comment meets at least 2 of these goals: 1. Invite another reader into the world of beauty you have seen in a work. 2. Provide a very brief summary of what you read. 3. Give your interpretation/perspective of what has been written. 4. Provide suggestions for improvement. The SprinNG team will evaluate the comments and select the winner of the bookstore gift card at the end of the month. Comment on the poems, book reviews, articles, interviews, and guest posts. By Njikonye Charles  before I pared my skin into the verses of the Psalms, before I learned the liturgy of how a
tongue can spit its bearer out / a pit of tightly meshed melancholy & trespasses by confessing a plain-hearted prayer to God, before I unlocked the gate of my soul to God's sparkle, before all, before equanimity—I lived a life enshrouded by agony, the darkness of the night, tumbling into my mouth. my existence wilted onto evil, catastrophe boating me from the softness of peace. sin was a cloak I wore, tethering me to the belly of oblivion. tell me, how do you relish joy when your conscience is a ship sinking into an ocean of rigid commotion? when your tongue is a city void of the covenants of Jehovah? O, how graceless & morbid were |