Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader

A profound, playful, and kaleidoscopic collection from one of our most evocative contemporary philosopher-poets.

A posthumanist polymath and "trans-public" intellectual, Báyò Akómoláfé has produced a vast body of work that represents a startling picture of the world in perpetual process and radical relation. Through an ever-growing archive of books, articles, interviews, films, social media posts, workshops, and rituals, Akómoláfé seeks to interrogate the fundamental assumptions and epistemological blind spots of our current culture in crisis.

Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader presents a poetically arranged selection of Akómoláfés short-form writings, which draw inspiration from Édouard Glissant; Gilles Deleuze; Gregory Bateson; Octavia Butler; Fernand Deligny; Chinua Achebe; the adventures of Esu, the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure; and more. A tightly curated composition of aphorisms, anti-epiphanies, prose poems, and philosophical fragments, Selah invites readers into the thicket of Akómoláfé's thought, weaving together threads of his most critically creative concepts--such as ontofugitivity, ecocognitive assemblage theory, parapolitics, and postactivism. Taking its title from an enigmatic Hebrew word that appears throughout the Book of Psalms--one that suggests a moment of ecstatic exclamation or musical notation--Selah is a book that can be read in an hour or studied for years, kept by your bedside or passed among friends like an open secret. For those already swimming in the depths of Akómoláfé's language, as well as those encountering his dynamic body of work for the first time, Selah offers an accessible and ecstatic entry into a visionary thinker's signature thought and poetics.

Selah is the second title from Aora Books, a publishing imprint dedicated to exploring transformational thought and culture that transcends borders, disciplines, and traditions. Rooted in an ethos of polyvocality and planetary consciousness, Aora publishes works that forge bold connections across time, place, ideas, and beings often seen as separate.

Author: Báyò Akómoláfé
Publisher: Aora
Published: 03/10/2026
Pages: 122
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.60h x 5.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781961814318

About the Author
Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD, rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi and the grateful life-partner to EJ, as well as a son and a brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled "trans-public" intellectual, and essayist, he is the author of two books: These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home and We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak! (with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye). Akómoláfé is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. Akómoláfé currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, and was recently appointed the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota (beginning in fall 2025). He is also the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California (Berkeley); the inaugural W. E. B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence for Trans-Public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics; and the inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute. Akómoláfé lives between Chennai, India and Great Barrington, Massachusetts with his family. He considers Brazil to be his spiritual home.

Eden Pearlstein is a multimedia language-artist and cofounder of Ayin Press. He is the author of Nothing Is for Everyone: Poems, a creative contributor to SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger, and coauthor/editor of the chapbook In/Flux: On Influence, Inspiration, Transmission, and Transformation. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

Krista Dragomer is a Brooklyn-based artist working in visual art, text, and sound. She is the inaugural Vunja Artist-in-Residence for Báyò Akómoláfé's organization Dancing with Mountains. A selection of her drawings is included in Dr. Beatrice Marovich's Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying and in the forthcoming anthology For The Wild.