NYBALF returns to Harlem, September 18–20. Free Festival Registration is open →
Uju Anya, Ph.D.
Scholar • Writer
Dr. Uju Anya is a university professor and researcher in applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies primarily examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students. Her other areas of inquiry include applied linguistics as a practice of social justice and translanguaging in world language pedagogy. She currently teaches and conducts research as associate professor of second language acquisition at the Carnegie Mellon University Department of Modern Languages.
Events featuring
this guest
Sunday Sept. 20 2026 • 11:30 AM | Harlem Stage Gatehouse
The Market and Popular Literature
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún · Kurt Thometz · Uju Anya
Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1960s, traders, printers, and schoolteachers in Onitsha turned a riverside market into one of the most prolific publishing scenes in modern Africa. Their pamphlets offered lessons in love, city life, etiquette, ambition, morality, and survival in an English that was inventive, unruly, and entirely its own. This conversation returns to Onitsha Market Literature and the wider traditions of popular writing it belongs to, asking where Nigerian literature begins, who literature is made for, what ordinary readers have always wanted from books, and what today’s publishing debates might learn from writing that flourished without metropolitan permission.