For more on Chris Abani, his website is fairly comprehensive. The Believer interviewed him several years ago; more recently, he went on a book tour with Joe Meno. Abani also curates the Black Goat poetry imprint.

Some additional q & a, cut for reasons of space, can be found below:
You've written novels, plays, poetry, and music; at what point do you know whether an idea will develop into one or another form?
I wrote plays a long time ago, when I was younger and they were meant to be vehicles for the political polemic that marked the student's movement in Nigeria years ago. With the exception of a new play written in 2003 for the Kennedy Foundation via Crossroads School in Santa Monica, I wouldn't call them real plays or art.As for the poetry and prose forms, well, it's hard to tell when I choose a form. I think that my process involves marinating of an idea in my subconscious for quite a long time so that by the time I actually begin to write, the form and much of the shape of the piece has been intuitively selected. I think though that there are ideas or explorations that suit poetry better than prose and vice versa. How I choose is mostly subjective and intuitively, both marked by years of practice and experience.

You've alternated your novels with shorter works -- first Becoming Abagail, and now Song For Night. Is this your preferred method of writing, or is it coincidental that these particular four works have been written in this order?
In retrospect, with hindsight, I think these four books form my four quartets, you know, like Eliot. I say this because most of the ideas for the three later books were deployed in GraceLand in truncated forms and had to be developed. Becoming Abigail indirectly rises out of the character of Efua in GraceLand and her not finished trajectory, Song for Night arises also indirectly from the character of Innocent in GraceLand who was a boy soldier. The Virgin of Flames is a thematic continuation of the aspects of Elvis that involved dress up and sexual exploration. So in fact these four books are very tightly linked and knitted. The forms, the alternating of them as novel novella novel novella is entirely coincidental.

Of your recent prose, Song For Night is the first to be set largely outside of a city; is it significant that the region where the book is set is much less specific than the three works that precede it?
In GraceLand the novel begins in the amoebic swamp city of Maroko and moves into the more concrete city of Lagos. As Elvis' identity becomes clearer and clearer, his relationship to his landscape becomes more concrete with increasing awareness. In Song for Night, the journey is through the interior landscape of memory and recovery, a landscape that goes the opposite way as GraceLand. Song starts near a swamp and moves away into even more tangled landscapes of rivers and forests. It is partly because this novella is generic to West Africa that it has no concrete landscape such as a city would provide, but also because the landscape is made entirely by the projections of the characters interiority. This is necessary since the book is a ghost story and that's all I can say without spoiling the reading.

Many of your protagonists are burdened from the outset by trauma, and in many cases their struggles against that is something that they can't win. To what extent do you think that our circumstances -- geographic, political, familial -- determine our fate? And is that a theme that you plan to continue exploring?
One of the things I am always asking is, is redemption possible and what shapes can it or must it take? I subcribe completely to the Rilke school of literature that believes in the transformative possibility of the word. That language shapes the world and not the other way around. Part of redemption is finding a why. why go on? why continue to believe? I think that once we can find a why we can bear any how. you know? Redemption, transformation comes from shaping the inner life, the inner light, the consciousness that can reshape the self and thus the world regardless of the geographic, political or familial traumas and/or limitations. I am a complete optimist. I wouldn't write otherwise. My journeys into the dark are to find light, to take the reader on the journey so that they can have a visceral transformation for themselves. I hope this is what I do. Bring people through the cave of the psyche into the light of hope.