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Alexis Okeowo on Blessings and Disasters
Okeowo discusses growing up in Alabama and reporting on the state's complicated, often-overlooked history.
Quick facts
Journalism · AfricaOn my shelf
A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa
Okeowo’s debut weaves together four narratives from across the continent: a couple held captive by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, a Mauritanian activist campaigning against modern-day slavery, a women’s basketball team playing on in war-torn Somalia, and a Nigerian vigilante taking up arms against Boko Haram. Rather than a survey of African crisis, it’s a close, patient portrait of the people who refuse to let extremism define their lives.
A Moonless, Starless Sky won the 2018 PEN Open Book Award, and it’s easy to see why: Okeowo resists both the victim narrative and the triumph narrative that usually flatten stories out of Africa, insisting instead on people who are simply, stubbornly still living their lives. Her own position — American-born to Nigerian parents, reporting as both insider and outsider — gives the book an unusual, self-aware vantage point.
Memoir · History
Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama
Okeowo turns from Africa to the American South, blending memoir with reporting and history to tell the story of the state she grew up in as the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. Blessings and Disasters moves between her own family’s history and Alabama’s lesser-known threads — Poarch Creek sovereignty battles, West African communities, Amazon warehouses replacing cotton fields — to complicate the stereotypes the state carries from outside.
This is a genuine pivot for Okeowo: the first-person material is new, and the reporting instincts she built profiling strangers across four African countries turn out to work just as well pointed at her own home state. It’s less a rejection of her earlier work than an extension of it — the same insistence that complicated, contradictory places deserve more than a single story.
Frequently asked questions about Alexis Okeowo’s books
From the bookshelf
“I was seeking out people who found themselves in suddenly extreme situations, and I was interested in what kind of choices they made and how they rose to the occasion.”
— Alexis Okeowo, on A Moonless, Starless Sky
For more reporting that insists complicated places deserve more than one story, browse the full shelf.
