The Possibility of Tenderness: Jason Allen-Paisant & Edward Adonteng in Conversation

Jason Allen-Paisant (FRSL) is an award-winning poet and writer whose works explore intimacy, memory, and the aesthetics of transformation. His poetry and prose attend to how history, perception, and the body shape one another. He earned a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from Oxford University, after working on theatre from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. His sophomore poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, won both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize for 2023. His recently published nonfiction book, The Possibility of Tenderness, is a hybrid memoir and lyric meditation on migration, kinship and the soil, and relearning intimacy with the self. He is also the author of Engagements with Aimé Césaire, a work of philosophy that thinks with Césaire’s poetics of revolt to ask what it means to be human after colonialism. Allen-Paisant is Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, an associate editor of Callaloo, and currently a Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

Edward Adonteng is an essayist, poet, artist, gardener, and academic from South London. He describes himself as a bridge-builder, facilitating discourse on several themes and creating platforms for people to thrive and fully exercise their ingenuity. Recently published as a Contemporary Ghanaian Poet, Edward ruminates on ways that human beings can communicate with each other in a new world that ignores the “little things.” He focuses on intellectual histories, epistemology, and anti-colonial thought/practice within academia. His attitude around growing is simple – to grow is to be human.