My Poetry Corner July 2024 features the poem “Nevertheless” from the debut poetry collection Tender Headed (USA, 2023) by Olatunde Osinaike, a poet, essayist, and software developer. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection, winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series.

Osinaike earned his BS in Engineering from Vanderbilt University (Tennessee) and his MS in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University (Maryland). Originally from the West Side of Chicago (Illinois), he currently lives with his wife in Atlanta, the capital of Georgia.

How did a data scientist for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton also become a poet? In an October 2023 interview for his alma mater, Vanderbilt University, Osinaike said: “I don’t think of the data science and the writing as different. You definitely use a lot of creativity in how you code. The best observations I ever got were in a technology forecasting class with Andy Van Schaack [associate professor of the practice of engineering management] my junior year at Vanderbilt. We talked about scenario analysis, convergent opinions. So, even if I’m looking at something under a microscope, I’m also thinking about the world around what I’m observing.”