Aishatu Ado

Aishatu Ado is an Afro-German folklore ecologist obsessed with a question empire prefers unanswered: what does a story do when it refuses to stay dead? Drawing on African and diasporic cosmovisions, she traces how oral traditions cross oceans, survive rupture, and seed liberated futures. Aishatu is the Grand Champion of the 2025 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, where her collection, Black Box Flight Recorder, was selected for publication. She has also won Fractured Lit’s Ghosts, Fables, Fairy Tales Prize and the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest. Her novel-in-progress placed third in CRAFT’s First Chapters Contest. A Clarion West graduate, she has received fellowships from Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Hurston/Wright, VONA, Roots Wounds Words, and Voodoonauts. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Nightmare, FIYAH, Obsidian, Baffling, Heartlines Spec, Kelp’s Ocean Poetry Anthology, Augur, and two Flame Tree anthologies: Afrofuturism Short Stories and Dreams Divine. More at aishatu.carrd.co.

BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER

They said I was lucky,

born into the cloud, into connection,

but connection was the leash.

Every click — a breadcrumb,

every selfie — a scan.

They tagged my joy for future use,

built an archive of my fear, called it insight.

My grandmother never typed.

She coded in breath, in rhythm, in handclap.

Said the first encryption was the drum,

the mouth, the original modem.

–Excerpt from “Black Box Manifesto”

Button is excited to announce this year’s winner of Button’s Chapbook Contest!

BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER is a speculative Afrofuturist archive about a Black girl who severs herself from the surveillance systems that shaped her — family, technology, empire— and, through the wreckage of revolution and its aftermath, discovers that freedom is both loss and becoming.

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Aishatu Ado in the Button Store

BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER

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