Dr. Abena P.A. Busia

Dr. Abena P.A. Busia, co-director of the groundbreaking Women Writing Africa Project, a multi-volume anthology published by the feminist Press at CUNY. As Busia points out, “history is located in multiple places”. This collection is designed to recognize “cultural production” of African and Indian women for the first time. She is also co-editor of Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel, (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2005). In addition to her leadership of the Women Writing Africa project, Professor Busia is the author of Theorising Black feminisms (Routledge, 1993) and many articles and book chapters on topics including black women’s writing, black feminist criticism, and African literature. Her scholarship keeps her actively connected to her native Ghana, where a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Grant enabled Busia and two historians to lead an interdisciplinary program on “Teaching the History of Slave Trade Routes of Ghana and Benin”. She is now at work on a book called Song in a Strange land: Narrative and Rituals of Remembrance in the Novels of Black Women of Africa and the African Diaspora. A poet and short story writer as well as a scholar, Busia has published a poetry collection called Testimonies of Exile. She serves on the advisory board of the Ghana Education Project, as well as the board of the African Women’s Development Fund, the first and only pan-African funding source for women-centered programs and organisations. She teaches courses in African-American and African Diaspora Literature.