Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri

What was your favorite book as a child?

My favorite book as a child was Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day by Nikki Giovanni. I encountered it through my English teacher, who noticed the short poems and stories I was scribbling in the margins of my exercise books and gave me the book. Reading Giovanni felt strangely familiar. I grew up in Ghana, where the first poetry I knew was spoken. My grandparents filled our evenings with stories, songs, pauses, and silences. Their storytelling taught me music, timing, imagery, and the power of the spoken word before I knew to call any of it poetry. When I read Giovanni, I felt some of that same energy on the page. Her poems carried a voice that felt alive and intimate, and they showed me that poetry could hold everyday experience, vulnerability, humor, memory, and history. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day opened a door for me. It was one of the first books that made me understand that poetry could sound like someone speaking directly to you.

What was the original reason or motivation why you started writing creatively?

I started writing when I was seven. At the time, drawing and storytelling were inseparable for me. Every picture I made felt unfinished without words, so I began adding labels, inventing stories, and creating little worlds around my drawings. As I grew older, writing became a way of understanding the world around me. As a first-generation student, I learned from whatever I could find: flash-fiction booklets, anime, short stories, conversations, and books. Reading and writing opened doors I never imagined I would walk through, and writing became a lifeline, a place where I could process what I was experiencing and make sense of things that were difficult to articulate. I think that original impulse is still present in my work. I write because I am curious about people, memory, place, and the unnoticed details of mundane life. Language allows me to examine those things closely and, sometimes, to make them visible to someone else.

What was the most adventurous or thrilling thing you ever did/experienced?

Some of my most thrilling childhood experiences came from following my grandfather, Ajabui, and my friends into the bush to hunt. We went after squirrels, rabbits, and birds, searched for small termites to feed our days- or weeks-old chickens, and sometimes went looking for honey. Honey hunting was especially dangerous. We would climb or get close to the hives, and the bees would come after us. I would return home with swollen hands or a swollen face from the bites, wondering why I had gone in the first place. Ajabui, somehow, always came back completely intact. Nothing seemed to happen to him. He moved through the bush with a confidence I did not have, as though he already knew what the land was saying. Those trips were thrilling because we never knew what the day would bring. We learned to watch the trees, listen for movement, follow tracks, and pay attention to the smallest changes around us. Looking back, I think those experiences taught me something about attention that has stayed with me as a writer.

Do you listen to music while reading or writing? Why/why not?

Sometimes I listen to music while writing, and other times I need silence. It depends on what I am trying to write. I sometimes listen to classical music because I find its movement and structure creatively stimulating. At other times, I listen to music in languages I do not understand, such as Spanish or Yoruba. I enjoy being able to listen without immediately focusing on the meaning of the words. I pay attention instead to the sounds and emotions in the music. Somehow, that distance from language opens my mind and allows me to write differently. There are also days when I turn everything off. Silence gives me another kind of space. I like hearing my own thoughts and listening closely to the movement of language as I write. So both music and silence have a place in my process.