Porsha Olayiwola

When Porsha Olayiwola was named Boston’s third poet laureate, she had just started her MFA program at Emerson. Still discovering who she was as a poet, she experienced some imposter syndrome at first, she admitted, but ultimately accepted the title and its associated responsibilities as a “gift.”

Boston Lyric Opera (BLO) commissioned “The Wanderer’s Tethering,” a bold new work by Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola and composer Mason Bynes that tells the story of Georgia’s Igbo revolution in 1803.