Syl Cheney-Coker

Background

Syl Cheney-Coker was born on Born June 28, 1945, in Freetown, West Africa. Educated in the United States, he has a global sense of literary history, and has introduced styles and techniques from French and Latin American literatures to Sierra Leone. He has spent much of his life in exile from his native country.

Education

Syl went to the United States in 1966, where he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After his schooling he returned briefly to Sierra Leone.

Career

Syl accepted a position at the University of the Philippines in 1975; he later married a Filipino woman. He moved to Nigeria in 1977 to teach at the University of Maiduguri, and returned to the United States in 1988 to be Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa.

In the early 1990s, Cheney-Coker returned to Freetown to become editor of a progressive newspaper, the Vanguard. In part through the efforts of Wole Soyinka, an exiled Nigerian poet teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Cheney-Coker was invited to be the first writer in the City of Asylum program in Las Vegas, Nevada. He decided to return to a somewhat more stable Sierra Leone in 2003.

Achievements

• Syl has been called one of the more western-influenced African poets for his poems.

Works

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• book

  • Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar: A Novel of Magical Vision (African Writers Series)

    (In a chimerical world of illusion and truth, fired by a l...)

    1990
  • Stone Child and Other Poems

    (Stone Child is about the nameless gemstone child that bec...)

    2008
  • Concerto for an exile: poems. 1973
  • Sacred River: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series) 2014
  • The Road to Jamaica 2015
  • Farewell to dreams and other poems 2013

Connections

Syl married a Filipino woman.

References

• Emerging Perspectives on Syl Cheney-Coker Syl Cheney-Coker is generally regarded as Sierra Leone s leading writer. Indeed, he is one of the most accomplished and challenging writers to have emerged from Africa in recent years and his works have deservedly won several literary awards.
  2014