Meet 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe

Leading up to the 2025 Ruth Lilly-Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellows' reading in Miami on Friday, April 10 as part of O, Miami's Poetry Festival, we will feature profiles of each of the five fellows. We are excited to continue introducing you to and celebrating these outstanding young poets.

Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe received the news that she was awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship while on the bus from New York to Providence, Rhode Island. “I just went home and laid on the floor looking at the ceiling because I couldn’t believe it,” she says. Her mother, her favorite person in the world, cried back home in Nigeria. Ibe thinks her mother was even happier than she was at the news. 

Based in Wisconsin for a fellowship with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ibe is currently working on a poetry manuscript seeking to “negotiate the place of the self in history.” She says much of her work orbits shame as an operational emotional force, describing it as “something very flammable” that, unlike guilt, does not require an audience or external pressure. She draws inspiration from Tomas Tranströmer, describing his work as “a poetry of surprise,” as well as D.M. Aderibigbe, Victoria Chang, Safia Elhillo, Louise Glück, Romeo Oriogun, Paul Tran, and Solmaz Sharif, to name a few. Ibe views the fellowship as an opportunity to write into spaces that she would otherwise not due to the expectations placed on writers of color. 

To Ibe, poetry prevents her from walking in the world “like someone who is dead.” She says, “One of the most important things about poetry is the ability to pattern language in such a way that we can begin to feel. To live in the world when we’re unable to feel, unable to understand, and unable to have this tactile relationship toward things is to be a dead person.” 

She became interested in poetry as a child listening to her father retell stories he’d read. “My heart would leap with extreme joy, would leap with amazement,” she says. “I needed to be a writer.” She describes poetry as a door. “Poetry’s the way that I enter into the things that I’ve always been scared to enter into. And sometimes poetry is also the way that I exit the things that have always held me back.” 

As a writer, Ibe describes herself as obsessive. She describes carrying an idea for a poem with her, thinking about it constantly. “It makes me sweat, it makes me get frustrated, it makes me overthink,” she says. She obsesses over the idea and the language, and finds the endings of her poems through writing them. “I go to poetry, hoping that the gods of language shine their light on me.” 

Considering the fellowship, she’s excited to “grow horizontally,” a phrase she learned from a virtual class visit by Ama Codjoe during her time working on her MFA at UW-Madison. “You should actually try to grow with people who are in your own generation of writers, rather than trying to go after people who are way more accomplished,” she says. Growing horizontally gives the freedom and space to try new things and to fail. Ibe is excited to be in community with the other fellows and offer each other that space. 

In her spare time, Ibe listens to the On Being Project Poetry Unbound podcast and watches Nollywood movies on YouTube. She says that even though the movies are predictable, they remind her of home, of Nigeria. “One of the worst things that can happen to writers is forgetting, and I try not to forget where I come from,” she says. Her connection to her history as a Nigerian is an aspect of herself and her life that she holds closely.

Ibe advises other young poets not to be afraid of the poems they want to write. To write toward honesty, rather than performance. “If the poems are not able to change your life, then they can’t change anybody else’s life,” she says.