Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet and essayist, now living in Atlanta with his wife. He is the author of Image + Likeness (Alice James Books, forthcoming) and Tender Headed (Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Camille Rankine as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His debut collection, for which he was named the 2024 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, has been celebrated by The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Brittle Paper, New York Times, and EBONY Magazine. A winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, his work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, 68to05, The Slowdown, Obsidian, Poet Lore, 20.35 Africa, Hunger Mountain, Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.

Over and over again, throughout this capacious collection, Osinaike manages to craft the exact shape to contain outsize emotions such as love and longing, satisfaction and regret. There are so many appetites here: so many eyes, tongues, hungers, and journeys. Image + Likeness is a “diamond/ in a meadow.” And oh, how it gleams.
—Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude

In Image + Likeness, Olatunde Osinaike writes toward the difficult miracle of being seen clearly in the everyday theater that is America. With an ear keen to the world around him and a voice deeply alive to beauty, these poems move through love, family, Blackness, art, grief, film, and music. Here, the image is never still; it argues, remembers, pays homage, misbehaves, and asks what a life becomes when it refuses to be reduced to spectacle. Osinaike has made a book where language keeps turning, asking us to look again. My people say a griot is one who moves the world through language. I believe Osinaike is one, and this book is a gift of language."
—Romeo Oriogun, author of The Gathering of Bastards, finalist for the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 2024 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry