Syl Cheney-Coker is a renowned poet, novelist, and journalist born in 1945 in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon and has taught at universities in the Philippines, Nigeria, and the US. He returned to Freetown in the early 1990s, becoming an editor of the progressive newspaper, Vanguard. After a political coup in 1997, however, Cheney-Coker was targeted for his criticism of Sierra Leone's military government and forced into exile. Alongside Wole Soyinka, another renowned and exiled writer, he relocated to the City of Asylum in Las Vegas, Nevada. His poetry collections include The Road to Jamaica (1969), Blood in the Desert’s Eye (1990) and Stone Child and Other Poems (2008). His debut novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) was the winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region) in 1991. The Sacred River (2014) was his long-awaited sequel and return to fiction. Cheney-Coker returned to Sierra Leone in 2003 and now divides his time between there and the US.
