ktravula – a travelogue!

I started writing here in August 2009 at the beginning of a Fulbright Fellowship and travel experience to the United States, to document my travel, schooling, and teaching experiences. The fellowship ended in 2010, but the blog continued to be a space to reflect and document my thoughts and opinions on my travel, culture, language, classroom experiences, and other personal thoughts and opinions on current affairs, the field of linguistics, creative writing, and other things I feel passionate about. My full writing/publication history can be found here while a list of notable places I’ve visited and written about can be found here.

I don’t blog as often as I used to (almost twice a day at some point) because of other professional and vocational commitments (I currently run and curate a dictionary of names at YorubaName.com), but I’ve returned here over and over to put down thoughts I felt are worth sharing, from narratives and pictures from travel experiences to personal essays, strong opinions, and investigative reporting. The blog is updated now whenever I can. I have also featured other people’s opinions on things I care about in creative writing, linguistics, education, travel, language, journalism, politics, and the arts in general through guest posts.

In November 2018, my book Edwardsville by Heart was published. It is my first full collection of poems, derived from the above-discussed travel experience in the United States, covering poetic narratives of places, people, patterns, events, feelings, moods, and other encounters during those three years (2009-2012). In some way, the publication was a coda for the travel period that necessitated this blog.

Howard Rambsy II (Professor of English, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) calls the book “an artistic map disguised as a volume of poetry”, while Geoff Schmidt, author of Out of Time (University of North Texas Press) says it “gives us fresh eyes to see what we thought was familiar.” Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Sanctificum, says its “nomadic drive… propels the reader through the exploration of self as home, as nation, as language, as love and as displacement.” There are a few other reviews of it you can read here.

You can get a copy on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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About the Blogger

My name is Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún. I have worked as a Lexicographical Advisor for Oxford University Press Dictionaries in Hamburg/London, NLP Linguist for African Languages at Google Nigeria (via Tusen Consulting), and as a Chevening Reasearch Fellow at the British Library in London.

From 2015-2016, I worked as a Speech Linguistic Project Manager at Google Nigeria (via Talentwise). Before then, I’ve taught as a university professor, high school teacher, and adult literacy volunteer. I’ve also worked as an editor of a literary magazine online, a print literary magazine, and an anthology of high school students’ creative works.

I’m passionate about the use of mother tongue in education and in literature, and I’ve done some work in that regard, including harassing Twitter for two years about Yorùbá. In 2015, I founded a nonprofit endeavour to document all Yorùbá names in a web dictionary as a way of opening making the internet more relevant for Nigerian and African languages. I’ve written about my work in web and print platforms including SOAS, AfricanArguments, and so on.

My creative works have been published in Sentinel Poetry Quarterly, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, Sentinel Nigeria, Klorofyl, Saraba Magazine, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Subjective Substance, Farafina, 234Next, International Literary Quarterly, The Moth, The Alestle (SIUE), College of Arts and Science publication (CAS), Eye Socket Journal, Ake Review, Nigerianstalk.org, Guardian UK, and elsewhere. You can find more information about my publishing history here.

My professional interests, specialties and curiosities include: Tone, Tonal Phonology, ESL Education, Machine Translation, Language Technology, Fiction, Short films, Poetry, Editing, Literary Translation, Teaching, Linguistics, Writing, Poetry, Creative Non-fiction, Photography, Music, Travel writing, HTML, Volunteer work, Blogging, Language, Language Documentation, Yoruba, Nigerian English, Journalism, Fulbright, United States, History, Geography and Travel.

My personal website is at www.kolatubosun.com.

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While the content of the blog is protected by copyright, they can be freely shared and reused on blogs and print publications but only with proper attribution to KTravula.com or Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún. An email request is welcome, but unnecessary.

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Contacts (in case you want to read more, contact me, or offer me a job):

eMail, Facebook, Twitter, Academia.Edu, Instagram, Wikipedia, Medium, Google+, LinkedIn

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KTravula.com is the 2019 media partner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature