A Survey of African Poetry in the London Times, Sunday Times, Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement 1865-1985

Ama Ata Aidoo was born in 1942 in Abeadzi Kyiakor, Ghana. A poet, novelist and playwright, Aidoo attended the Wesley Girls High School and the University of Ghana where she received her bachelor's degree in 1964. As an undergraduate student, she was invited to the University of Ibidan’s African Writers Workshop, where she met and was influenced by the writers Langston Hughes, Chinua Achebe, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Sokinka, and Christopher Okigbo. Her play The Dilemma of a Ghost was published in 1965 to critical acclaim. She is the author of several novels, plays and collections of poetry including, No Sweetness Here (Longman, 1970), Anowa (Longman, 1970), Our Sister Killjoy, Or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (Longman, 1977), Birds and Other Stories (1987), Changes (Heinemann, 1991), An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems (Dangaroo Press, 1992), The Girl Who Can and Other Stories (1997), Diplomatic Pounds and Other Stories (Ayebia Clark Publishing, 2012), and After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press, 2017). In 1974 she became a fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University where she also worked as a consulting professor at the Phelps-Stokes fund’s Ethnic Studies Program. She has taught at many colleges including the University of Ghana, Cape Coast University, Hamilton College, Brown, Xavier University, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Oberlin, Hamilton, and Brandeis. She was also the minister of education for Ghana under the Jerry Rawlings administration.