Abena Busia

Professor Abena Busia
Born	Abena P.A. Busia 1953 (age 70–71) Accra, Ghana
Nationality	Ghanaian
Occupation(s)	Lecturer, writer, poet, feminist

Abena P. A. Busia (born 1953) is a Ghanaian writer, poet, feminist, lecturer and diplomat. She is a daughter of former Ghana Head of State Kofi Abrefa Busia, and is the sister of actress Akosua Busia. Abena Busia is an associate professor of Literature in English, and of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is currently Ghana's ambassador to Brazil.

Early life

Abena Busia was born in Accra, into the Yenfri Royal family in Wenchi in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana, to Kofi Abrefa Busia, one-time Ghana's Head of State, and Naa Morkor Busia. She spent her childhood at home as well as in the Netherlands and Mexico before relocating to Oxford, where her family finally settled.

Education

Abena Busia earned a B.A. degree in English Language and Literature at St. Anne's College, Oxford, in 1976, and a D.Phil in Social Anthropology (Race Relations) at St. Antony's College in 1984. She has been an external tutor at Ruskin College, the labour relations college affiliated to the University of Oxford, and a visiting lecturer in the Program of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University. She has also won a number of post-doctoral fellowships including an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in the English department of Bryn Mawr College, and an Institute for American Cultures Fellowship at the Center for Afro-American Studies at UCLA.

Career

Busia is the co-director of Women Writing Africa Project and is also currently an associate professor at Rutgers University and currently the Chair of the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

She has also taught at other renowned institutions such as Yale and the University of Ghana. She has published widely on black women's literature, colonial discourse, and post-colonial studies, and scholarly books she has co-edited include Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (1993) and Beyond Survival: African Literature and the Search for New Life (1999). In addition, she is the author of two volumes of poetry: Testimonies of Exile (1990) and Traces of Life (2008). Her work is included in such anthologies as Daughters of Africa (ed. Margaret Busby, 1992).

Ghanaian diplomat

In July 2017, President Nana Akuffo-Addo named Abena Busia as Ghana's ambassador to Brazil. She was among 22 other distinguished Ghanaians who were named to head various diplomatic Ghanaian mission in the world.

Selected bibliography

Poetry

• Testimonies of Exile — poetry, illustrated by Akosua Busia (Africa World Press, 1990; ISBN 978-0865431614)
• Traces of a Life: A Collection of Elegies and Praise Poems (Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2008; ISBN 978-0955507977)

As editor

• Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, co-editor with Stanlie M. James (Routledge, 1993; ISBN 978-0415073370)
• Beyond Survival: African Literature and the Search for New Life, co-editor with Kofi Anyidoho and Anne Adams (Africa World Press, 1999; ISBN 978-0865437098)
• Women Writing Africa: West Africa and Sahel (2005)

Awards and recogntion

Abena is co-founder and Chair of Busia Foundation International a non-government organisation set up to in honour of Ghana's Former Prime Minister, Kofi Abrefa Busia.

See also

• Kofi Abrefa Busia
• Akosua Busia
• List of Ghanaian writers