Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe
Author photo for Foreign Gods, Inc.
Born	1960 Yola, Nigeria
Occupation	novelist
Genre	Political fiction
Notable works	Arrows of Rain (novel, 2000) Foreign Gods, Inc. (novel, 2014)

Okechukwu Ndibe, better known as Okey Ndibe, (born 1960) is a novelist, political columnist, and essayist. Of Igbo ethnicity, Ndibe was born in Yola, Nigeria. He is the author of Arrows of Rain and Foreign Gods, Inc., two critically acclaimed novels published in 2000 and 2014 respectively. Ndibe is one of the foremost respected and admired contributors to the social and political essence of Nigeria or lack of it.

Okey Ndibe was born in Yola, Nigeria. His father was a postal worker, and his mother a teacher. His early life in Nigeria was marked by the Biafran War, a subject that he later wrote about in an essay entitled "My Biafran Eyes". At the end of the Biafran War, he finished his elementary school education in the town of Enugwu Ukwu and attended St. Michael's Secondary School, Nimo, in Anambra State, Nigeria.

Ndibe worked in Nigeria as a journalist and magazine editor, and came to the United States in 1988 at the invitation of famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. In the United States, Ndibe helped to found African Commentary, a magazine described as "award-winning and widely acclaimed". Ndibe holds both an MFA in writing and a PhD in literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst He continued to write for magazines and papers in the United States, winning the 2001 Association of Opinion Page Editors award for best opinion essay in an American newspaper for his piece Eyes to the Ground: The Perils of the Black Student.

Ndibe has worked as a professor at several colleges, including Connecticut College, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Trinity College Connecticut, and Brown University. He is currently the Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Ndibe is an author of short fiction, novels, poetry and political commentary. He is a regular columnist for NEXT, a Nigerian newspaper. He also contributes to many other publications, including The Hartford Courant, The Fabian Society Journal, Black Issues Book Review, BBC Online. He has contributed poetry to An Anthology of New West African Poets. His first novel, entitled Arrows of Rain, was published in 2000. His second novel, Foreign Gods, Incorporated, was published by SOHO Press in 2014.