Naked Testimonies, first published in 1995, established the name of its author in Nigeria. It won an honourable mention in the Association of Nigerian Authors poetry awards that year, and its reputation remains as high as ever today. Reading the poems here, one is struck by a quiet eruption of energy, like the calmness of a river masking the immense energy beneath.
As well as Naked Testimonies, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel is the author of Die Aromaforscherin and Flackernde Kerzen. She is the editor of 25 New Nigerian Poets and co-editor of Inkwells and Breaking The Silence. She is a Fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude and has been Writer in Residence at the Villa Waldberta, Munich and The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, Visby, Sweden. She holds an MA degree from the Obafemi Awolowo University, and has published poems, stories and book reviews in many journals and newspapers. She has served in an executive capacity on the board of the Association of Nigerian Authors, whose official annual journal, ANA Review, she also edited. Toyin is renowned for her readings of both poems and stories to audiences in Africa, Europe and North and South America. She founded the Women Writers of Nigeria, WRITA, in 1991.