Bayo Akomolafe considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son, Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma. “To learn the importance of insignificance” is the way he frames a desire to reacquaint himself with a world that is irretrievably entangled, preposterously alive and completely partial. He is the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project] and host of the online writing course, ‘We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’. As Coordinating Curator of The Emergence Network, Bayo hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crises of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify.
Bayo is author and editor of ‘We will tell our own story!’ with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye, and ‘These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home‘ (North Atlantic Books, 2017). Ej and Bayo are ecstatic parents of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. His most fervent passions are Ej, drawing, singing, writing, designing, speaking, and travelling.