Biography

Blessing Omeiza Ojo is a Nigerian teacher and author of Cry of an Orphan (novel, 2015) The Misunderstanding (drama, 2017) Light Dish (Poetry Chapbook, 2019) and The White Shadow of Illusion (novel, 2020). He has contributed to several anthologies and written for Roughcut Press, Lunaris Review, Praxis, Parousia, Wax Poetry Journal, and others. His awards include the 2019 Korea-Nigeria Poetry Prize (Ambassador Special Prize) and the September 2018 Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest (Second runner up). Blessing holds a National Diploma in Chemical Engineering and is currently a creative writing instructor at Jewel Model Secondary School, Abuja, where he has coached winners of national and international writing prizes. He believes the literary world is too spacious a world to be inhabited by few individuals.

Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher of literature, particularly poetry, a  genre marked by students to be too rocky a path for young minds to walk, I believe that we are made with freewill to express, to create and re-create. In every classroom, I create a serene atmosphere, so different from what our home or the world offers us. Poetry offers freedom and should unveil the truth always. Why should I set a terminus point? Often, I enhance my students’ spirits, at the start and conclusion of every class, because I consider my role as a creative writing instructor to be to help my students find a space in the literary world. I teach them to view poetry as an individual journey, while I play the persona of messiah. To mould poetry into a pie every of my student hungers for, we read and review great/contemporary/exemplary poets, picking their lines one after another, cruising our minds within the coast of the poet’s emotion. I teach them through illustrations and collaborations, exploring and delving into the events at home and everywhere, a way of keeping their muse aglow.