Last week, the English department hosted award-winning poet and playwright Nick Makoha on campus. On Monday, students and faculty gathered in the Library Athenaeum for a poetry reading by Makoha from his latest book, “The New Carthaginians.” On Tuesday, Makoha visited and guest taught the Advanced Poetry Workshop by Professor Greg Hewett. He also ate lunch with two student groups that week.
Nick Makoha is a Ugandan writer based in London. His first collection, “Kingdom of Gravity,” was a Guardian Best Book of the Year. His poems can be seen in The New York Times, The Poetry Review, Wasafiri and many other publications. He also is the founder of the Obsidian Foundation, a retreat and movement for Black poets of African descent. His book “The New Carthaginians” is published by Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom, and Minneapolis-based Milkweed Editions in the United States.
“The New Carthaginians” is what Penguin Random House calls a “staggeringly original” collection, offering a central image of the 1976 hijacked civilian flight landing at Entebbe International Airport. According to Makoha, this event triggered the crisis that led to Uganda becoming a pariah state, and soon to Makoha fleeing the country with his mother. Throughout the book, Makoha channels three characters: “The Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat,” through which he creates a new mythos.
Professor of English Greg Hewett first met Makoha when teaching the Living London OCS program in Spring 2024.
“I was looking for writers to visit my class, and this wonderful woman that we hired to teach our Urban Studies class gave me a list of who she thought were really cool, up and coming, important writers,” said Hewett. “Nick was among them, and he was a huge hit.” After that encounter, Hewett recommended that Makoha visit the next London OCS cohort, hosted by Nancy Cho, where he was “a hit” as well. When “The New Carthaginians” was picked up by the conveniently close Milkweed Editions, Hewett invited Makoha to come to campus. The visit was paid for by the Fred W. & Margaret C. Schuster Lectureship.
On the night of the poetry reading, Hewett introduced Nick Makoha as a “poetic storm.” This was fitting, as throughout the night the sky darkened, then began to pour. About fifty students and faculty were in the audience. Makoha was a dramatic, captivating reader, and encouraged listeners to interject with questions at any point. Before reading each poem, he told stories that gave context for their creation.
“My wife doesn’t allow me to write love poems,” said Makoha. “This is technically a love poem to my wife, but I’m not really allowed to say her name, so I have to make some other character that is my wife, but I can’t say it. You never heard that from me!”
“I thought it was really interesting to hear him give voice to the poems,” said Lillie Geil ’26. Geil is a student in Advanced Poetry Workshop, which read “The New Carthaginians” in preparation for the visit.
“I think in our class we all had the experience of not quite understanding what he was saying the whole time, but then when we heard him read it, it was illuminating,” said Geil.
“I thought he brought his background in theater to the space in a really cool way. I think he was a performer, and he understood that the room was his audience. He really spoke to us who were there in that moment during the storm,” added Gitanjali Matthes ’25, who is also a student in the Advanced Poetry Workshop.
After Makoha read, he answered questions from the audience. Meanwhile, the weather outside intensified. Just as he finished his last response, the piercing blare of a severe weather alert erupted from someone’s phone, ending the reading with sensational flair.
“I noticed that the crowd was invested in the reading,” said Makoha, reflecting on the event in post-storm retrospect. “Not just because I was reading it — they came with books, they came with questions. And also the weather — it was a potential tornado, so it gave a dramatic edge. I’ll always remember it — ‘remember that night where we could have died?’”
The next day, Makoha visited Hewett’s poetry workshop. He first read some of his poems, then coached students in how to read poems in a way that illuminated their meanings.
“It was a total change of pace from our regular workshop style, which was exciting. I think he brought a lot of energy and a lot of confidence in his poetics to the space, and pushed us to do things that we hadn’t worked on or thought about before,” Matthes said.
After the dialogue about Makoha’s own work, the class shifted to giving feedback on student work, which Makoha led.
“This afternoon I was looking out the windows at a beautiful sunny day while being locked in a room and berated by an incredible poet named Nick Makoha,” said Ben Scott-Lewis ’25, whose poem was workshopped in class.
“This is my first poetry workshop class, and generally there has been this extreme gentleness in all feedback I’ve received. Not that there was anything un-gentle about the way Nick gave feedback, but it was definitely very direct in a super helpful way. No beating around the bush, lots of offering ideas of how things could be better communicated,” said Scott-Lewis.
Other classmates reiterated similar sentiments on the direct style of the workshop.
“It was cool to get more radical feedback, because I feel like usually we are pretty kind to each other, which I like, but it was interesting to get — not that he wasn’t kind — a more radical shifting of the poems. I feel like it opened up my perception of how I should revise the poems,” said Geil.
According to Hewett, this kind of pedagogic shake-up is one of the main goals of a visiting poet. With Carleton being a small college, and Hewett acting as the resident poetry professor, he emphasizes the importance of this kind of exposure, saying, “I think it’s good to have other people who are not me visit, and see what their poetry and views are like.” Hewett also noted that while there are classes on British literature, “we don’t have a lot of [perspectives of] people of color from the UK, and their art,” adding to the importance of Makoha’s visit.
For his part, Makoha enjoyed the role he played at Carleton.
“I love it,” Makoha said. “I think the students are hardworking, I think they’re open, they ask really good questions. But also they think. We live in a world where — with no judgement — because everything is automated for you, thinking is actually important. Thinking and feeling are both important. A lot of times we feel, but we don’t want to think about how we feel. The joy and curse of a poet is that you interrogate thoughts and feelings, and then you give them a language to render them. I enjoy being in an environment where that’s encouraged, and people are open to the inquiry of that. So when I was invited by Greg, I was like ‘light work.’ I’ll be here, bells on.”