Aishatu Ado

Aishatu Ado (she/her) 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 survive rupture and seed liberated futures. Her collection, Black Box Flight Recorder, won the 2025 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. She has also won Fractured Lit’s Ghosts, Fables, Fairy Tales Prize and the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest. A Clarion West graduate, she has received fellowships from Odyssey, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Hurston/Wright, VONA, Roots Wounds Words, and Voodoonauts. Her fiction has appeared twice on Reactor Magazine’s Must Read list. Aishatu’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Nightmare, FIYAH, CRAFT, Obsidian, Baffling, Heartlines Spec, Kelp’s Ocean Poetry Anthology, Augur, and Flame Tree’s Afrofuturism Short Stories and Dreams Divine. More at aishatu.carrd.co.

BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER

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.

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”

Lay your obsidian hand across the city

thumb every tower dark

let every blue-lit altar in our palms

lose its god.

—Excerpt from “Blackout, Beloved”

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Aishatu Ado in the Button Store

BLACK BOX FLIGHT RECORDER

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