Brian Gyamfi is a poet and writer whose work builds on a foundation of Blackness, hauntology, and deviance, taking up boyhood, love, ancestral memory, and spirituality, and drawing on Black and postcolonial scholarship. His debut collection, What God in the Kingdom of Bastards (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), follows two brothers — Lot, the living elder, and Frank, the younger, now a ghost after his suicide — through mourning, memory, and the inherited harm of colonial history.

He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan, two Hopwood Awards, the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award, and has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Poetry International Prize, the Oxford Poetry Prize, and the Hopwood Drama Award. His libretto The Ants Are Illuminated was commissioned by Overtone Industry. His work has appeared in POETRY, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Poetry International, and Guernica.

Gyamfi holds a BA summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he taught academic composition and creative writing. He is a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry.