Dear Literary Agent,

When, during the summer of COVID and George Floyd, I found myself in an airport hotel room waiting for my emergency flight out of Indianapolis to New York, I thought to myself, ‘what comes of exiled queer individuals when the compassion runs out and they have nowhere else to go?’

Accidental Artist // An Interview with My Chi shines its unusual light on the life of an individual caught at the intersections of migration, queerness, family violence, and poverty, and it reveals to us the way they set themselves on a path to a life they could be proud of by the combined power of their faith in their chi and their diligent work to not succumb to what felt inevitable.

Accidental Artist // An Interview with My Chi is hard to place on a line-up of books because of its unconventional entry into the world. It is comprised of short stories that might remind some of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck, but there are also nonfiction writings that assess the world in a way similar to what Teju Cole did in Known and Strange Things. The energy of Danez Smith’s unabashed approach to queer realities is reflected in the book and its overwhelming focus on Igbo ontology and religious practice can garner comparisons to Akwaeke Emezi’s dazzling debut Freshwater.

Accidental Artist // An Interview with My Chi follows Martha Page, an American, formerly based in London, journalist, who found herself in Washington D.C. in her late 30s married to a dutiful but sleepy Billy Joe while adjusting to life as a working mother and trying to figure out what to do with the documentary allowance she was gifted as a sign-on bonus when she was recruited as a talent-producer at NPR.

Desperate to not lose her budget allocation and the opportunity to launch her career as a documentary filmmaker, she makes an appeal for documentary ideas on Twitter. The response she receives takes her through the blue metal door of a homeless shelter in Northeast D.C. to places like Dakar and Bordeaux and into the mind of a queer Greek-born Nigerian American artist who had recently discovered his chi.

As she travels through the numerous worlds brought about by V and their chi, she also contemplates what it means for her and her future, especially as she comes to terms with the signs of pregnancy in her body despite the months of celibacy in her relationship with her husband.

The author, Vasilis-Chukwunonso Onwuaduegbo, is a queer Greek-born Nigerian American artist, entrepreneur, and human rights advocate.

In his capacity as an advocate, Vasilis has worked at several social cause institutions in cities like New York, Paris, and Indianapolis on issues relating to immigration, the LGBTQ community, African development, human trafficking, amongst other pressing issues that disempower and dehumanize individuals in favor of capital or bigoted ideologies.

Vasilis has served as a co-curator of the ‘Where is South’ exhibition at The Africa Center in NYC, where his art piece Full Reflections was showcased. He is also a former Gotham Writers Workshop student, and he has received several accolades for his essays and short stories.

Shedding the Archive, For New Beginnings is his self-publishing debut, and he currently lives and creates in Washington, D.C.

Chike Lawani is Vasilis’s companion and complement, the gift of a shadow that needs no light to be vivid. An offering to and an acknowledgment of personal gods everywhere, but most especially their very own chi ike.

Thank you so much for your consideration, I look forward to hearing from you.

Vasilis-Chukwunonso Onwuaduegbo