In the Fall of 2016, the Morehouse College Music Department issued a call for early-career Nigerian composers to submit applications for consideration. This project builds on the Morehouse College Glee Clubs reputation of performing African choral music under the direction of Wendell Whalum, Uzee Brown, Jr., and David Morrow In December 2016, Jude Nwankwo was selected as the inaugural recipient of the award. Mr. Nwankwo is a Lecturer of Music at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Mr. Nwankwo was commissioned to write a three- to five-minute piece for TTBB (male-voice) choir on secular themes in one of Nigerias roughly 500 languages. He selected the Yoruba language and the title of the new work is Iya Mi (My Mother). The premiere of Iya Mi took place Friday, March 31 at 7 P.M. in Morehouse Colleges Ray Charles Performing Arts Center. This occurred during the 2017 meeting of the National Association for the Study and Performance of African-American Music (NASPAAM), a national conference hosted at Morehouse College. Keywords: African American Studies; African History; African Languages and Societies; Critical and Cultural Studies; Dance; Digital Humanities; Ethnic Studies; Ethnomusicology; Folklore; Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication; Linguistic Anthropology; Migration Studies; Performance Studies; Poetry; Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies; Race and Ethnicity; Social and Cultural Anthropology; Sociology of Culture.