Transatlantic Ties

For Christopher Okonkwo, storytelling, the arts, and music are timelessly inseparable. The relations and interconnections between the disciplines of literature and music — writers incorporating music into their stories and culture and history being shared and spread through music and storytelling — yield a sense of fusion he finds fascinating.

Okonkwo, a professor of English at Florida State University, is a literary scholar whose work reveals how African culture travels across the Atlantic and how literature helps us reconstruct the past to better understand not only the present, but also stories that were erased, fragmented, or distorted by slavery and colonization.

“Much of my work connects to history because in order to write and teach literature effectively, we must first understand history,” said Okonkwo, who grew up in Nigeria. “We cannot undo the pasts that separated Africans and their descendants. However, we can preserve shared experiences as an act of remembrance and healing.”

Okonkwo earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1989 and was named the department’s best graduating student that same year. He then completed Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps program, which requires graduates to serve their country for one year through community work and education. While in that program, Okonkwo taught high school English for the first time, which inspired in him a lifelong commitment to teaching.

Soon after, he moved to Tallahassee, earning a master’s in applied social science from Florida A&M University in 1993. Okonkwo worked in corporate America for some years, but his continued interest in becoming a professor led him to pursue a doctorate in English at FSU. He completed it in 2001, winning the department’s Bertram and Ruth Davis Award for Outstanding Career as a Graduate Student and the Phi Kappa Phi Daisy Parker Flory Graduate Scholar Award. After graduating, Okonkwo joined the University of Missouri-Columbia English department, where he taught for the next two decades.

“Students rave about Dr. Okonkwo’s courses, which they find engaging, fun and intellectually challenging. His genuine enthusiasm and willingness to engage with them as fellow scholars makes his courses personally enriching.”

— Andrew Epstein, Department of English chair and professor

“I had great, supportive teachers, so I know the impact solid mentorship can have,” he said.

Okonkwo’s second book, “Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison,” published in 2022 by University of Virginia Press, explores the connections between Achebe and Morrison, two of the 20th century’s most influential writers. The work, which earned the 2022 College Language Association Book Prize and went on to be named a finalist for the 2024 African Literature Association’s Best Scholarly Book Award, led to a post-publication lecture that turned his thoughts back to Tallahassee.

“When I came back to give an invited lecture at FSU after ‘Kindred Spirits’ was published, the reception I received made me feel as if I had never left,” Okonkwo said.

Twenty-one years after his graduation, Okonkwo was recruited back to the FSU Department of English, this time as a professor. Since 2022, he’s introduced new courses exploring African and African American literature, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, the diaspora and more.

“Students rave about Dr. Okonkwo’s courses, which they find engaging, fun and intellectually challenging,” said Andrew Epstein, Department of English chair and professor. “His genuine enthusiasm and willingness to engage with them as fellow scholars makes his courses personally enriching.”

Okonkwo has earned widespread recognition via his published research, awards, grants and invited lectures. In Summer 2024, he joined the editorial board of Research in African Literatures, the most prestigious journal in African literature, and in 2025, he was invited to join the editorial board of Global South Literary Studies. At FSU, Okonkwo was nominated for the university’s Honors Thesis Mentor Award and the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in the 2024-2025 academic year.

“His presence has impacted our department tremendously,” Epstein said. “His expertise has introduced students to new literatures and cultures, strengthened our research profile, and attracted international students to study here.”

Last summer, Okonkwo published a seminal article on music in award-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s works, using the Igbo linguistic and musical concept “akụkọ na egwu,” which translates to “story and music.” He’s also working on his next book, “African Literature and Music: Akuko na Egwu, 1891-2025,” and has a commissioned essay, “Toni Morrison and Contemporary African Writers,” in Stephani Li’s forthcoming “Toni Morrison in Context.” In January 2025, at the invitation of the African Literature Association, he gave the talk “Tracking Fela’s Un(der)studied Cameos in African Fiction” as part of the association’s livestreamed 2025 lecture series.

“The more you research, the more you realize how deeply connected we are by history,” Okonkwo said. “Even within the painful chapters of Black history, African music connects us across generations.”

Carolina Ortega-Martinez is an FSU student pursuing dual degrees in digital media production and editing, writing and media. She is set to graduate in May 2026.