Oxford Translation Day: Ghost Letters: A Poetry Reading with Baba Badji

From his own deceased mother, Baba Badji’s Ghost Letters creates a ghost mother who becomes a presiding presence in his first collection of poems. Ghost Letters explores the intimacy of a private experience, focused on the momentary. At the same time, it focuses on a personal awareness of belonging, and in ruptured storylines investigates networks of people in different registers across mortalities, experiences of violence and hospitality, exile, history, and African myth.

Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, a researcher and a PHD in Comparative Literature, with the Track for International Writers & a combined Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His research and teaching interests center on the links between the various forms of postcolonial studies literature and theory, with a particular focus on the debates for cultural, translation, literary and Négritude in Anglophone and Francophone cultures.