Otosirieze Obi-Young is an author, editor, former academic, literary journalist, and the manager of media. He is editor of Folio Nigeria, a CNN-powered, multimedia storytelling network operated by Folio Media Group. He repositioned the blog to a revered powerhouse in African literature as Deputy Editor of Brittle Paper (Nov. 2016-Apr. 2020). He is a judge of The Gerald Kraak Prize, and in 2019 he was a judge of the Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship. He was born in 1994, and grew up overlooking the streets in Aba, southeastern Nigeria. He was honored with the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Literature Prize in 2019. In 2020, Avance Media named him among “The 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians.”
In The Threepenny Review and Transition, Otosirieze ‘s fiction appeared and was shortlisted for both the Miles Morland Literary Scholarship and the Gerald Kraak Prize in 2016. His work on the advocacy of queer equality in African literature was profiled in Literary Hub.
Otosirieze is the curator of the Art Naija Series, a series of thematic e-anthologies of writing and visual art that explore various aspects of Nigerian art. The first one, Enter Naija: The Book of Places (October 2016), focuses on Nigerian cities. The second, The Naija Work: The Book of Vocations (June, 2017), focuses on professions in Nigeria. He is Nonfiction Editor at 14, Nigeria’s first queer art collective. 14 has published two volumes, We Are Flowers (Jan. 2017) and The Inward Gaze (Jan. 2018).
Otosirieze has an M.A. B.A. in African Studies and Combined Honors In English & Literary and History & International Studies, both of Nigeria University, Nsukka. He taught English at the University of Godfrey Okoye, in Enugu.
Otosirieze has completed a collection of short stories, You Sing of a Longing, and will finish his novel any moment from now.
Otosirieze meets deadlines for writing and ghostwriting in his spare time, and is always, always available for more. He loves taking walks in the morning and in the evening. He likes genuine conversations. He studies pop culture and is interested in fancy medicine , science, and fashion. He is writing a personal blog, The Coo of a Blue-Plumed Bird, which he suspects may never become an essay novel. He Googles Rihanna while bored.
