Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe, the UW Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s 2025 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow, isn’t ready to leave just yet.
By Maggie Ginsberg, Division of the Arts
In 2023, Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe packed up her life in West Africa and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to begin her MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In her bag she carried everything except a stack of poems — she actually hadn’t written that many yet. Her undergraduate degree was in English and Literary Studies, and her early writing was mostly fiction. But, since arriving on campus, Ibe has emerged as a formidable poet by anyone’s measure — foremost, her own.
“I really, really wanted to get into Madison,” says Ibe, who was born and raised in Nigeria, and comes from a family of teachers but saw little opportunity for a career in writing in her home country. “This was the place I wanted to go first, because I’d seen the work of Amy Quan Barry, I’d seen the work of Paul Tran, and Nate Marshall, and all of these people who were absolutely brilliant in the literary world, and I felt it would be such a great opportunity to work with them, or work by them.”
Ibe not only gained acceptance into UW’s highly selective Creative Writing MFA program — which admits only six poets every two years — but also swiftly found her voice. In the short two-and-a-half years since arriving on campus, Ibe has earned the 2024 American Literary Review Poetry Prize, the 2025 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and, most recently, The Poetry Foundation’s 2025 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. The latter is among the largest monetary awards available to young poets in the United States, awarded to only five poets each year.
“I come from a really humble background, and that money means a lot to me, has done a lot for me,” Ibe says. “It changed my life.”
Ibe was also accepted into three competitive Ph.D. programs that would have begun this fall. But instead she turned down two and deferred a third to extend her time in Madison after learning she was awarded the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing’s coveted 2025 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship. It essentially serves as a third-year MFA for one current student, and provides a year of funded writing time in exchange for teaching creative writing to undergraduates.
“This sounds really mushy, but I didn’t think that my chapter in Madison was done,” Ibe says. “I felt like I needed this one year of respite, and the opportunity to teach myself from what I’ve learned here.”
The power of teaching
Now that Ibe is finished with the workshop portion of her MFA program, she must learn to self-edit her poems and create her own internal critic. But, in a sense, she’s got a new set of teachers: her Creative Writing 307 undergraduate students. “Teaching 307 to juniors and seniors is so enjoyable because they have some more advanced critical and creative muscles, and I’m trying to give them the best kind of education that I can afford to give them in that class,” Ibe says. “I’m increasingly learning that teaching is an activity in learning. The more you teach, the more you know about the thing you are teaching. Every time I prepare for class, I leave space for wonder.”
It takes a cohort
When Creative Writing cohorts are formed, it’s not just about the individual poets, but how they will fit together. “Iron sharpens iron,” Ibe says, quoting the bible to describe the impact the five other students in her MFA cohort had on her work and her life. “I don’t think I could have asked for a better cohort. My cohort has brilliance. Patrycja Humienik, Iqra Khan, juj e. Lepe, Jonny Teklit, Andrew Chi Keong Yim, they model a kind of love to me. I was still trying to negotiate myself as a foreigner and a stranger and it really helped that I had a cohort who loved me in the ways that they did.”
Poetry is a language
In her poem Object Permanence, Ibe writes, the language I have is not the one I crave. The poem is, among many things, an interrogation of memory and its inherent failings, as well as a mourning for the ways in which language fails to capture feelings. Ibe had been punishing herself for misremembering a key detail from a profoundly traumatic childhood moment with her sister, and through poetry was able to reframe her relationship with that core memory. “All of the things I want to say are beyond language, but still must be negotiated by language,” Ibe says. “Every time we come back to the poem, we must remember where we were at that point in time, and so language is the passage of returning.”
What she’ll take with her
Ibe has most loved sitting by Lake Mendota in quiet reflection, drawn to bodies of water because they, like the poet she has become, resist shape and framing. But after this year-long fellowship ends, Ibe is off to the Ph.D.
program she deferred at Utah. Like all formative educational experiences, she will leave this place changed. “It was here at UW–Madison that I learned that we must first write for ourselves,” says Ibe. It’s not about performing the images, language and poise of poetry, but in breaking down those very things so that what ends up on the page is the language only you can speak, the story only you can tell — and you, above all else, must believe your words are enough. “The poem has to first mean something to you, to mean something to anybody else.”