I’m busy at work, collecting, accepting, reading, editing, working with my team of readers and helpers as we begin the long process of putting together what will be the first comprehensive anthology of literary works from the small African Republic of Liberia, West Africa. The book will include works from the early days of the republic to the present, with key authors whose work have never been seen outside of Liberia, but who are the foundation of some of us contemporary writers. Manuscripts are coming in, an October 31st deadline, fast approaching. Already, we are accepting and rejecting, a rolling process to give writers the opportunity to edit, revise or send in new work. What keeps me excited is not what we who are now the older generation of living writers from Liberia have done, in Liberia, and the diaspora; what excites me, rather, is the new group of young, aspiring writers, most, who have been my mentees, a new generation of millennials, college students and recent graduates who in trying to make sense of the struggling economy and lack of opportunities, are turning to writing their own stories as a means of survival. These young people who did not experience the Liberian civil war as some of us older generation of writers, are the inheritors of that war, its crumbled buildings, broken streets, poor schools, the long road out of a war that devastated the country for fourteen years. These young people are the future. They are the future of not only the nation, but also its literature.
