ABSTRACT This article makes the case for confessional genre as a contemporary African literary form afforded by the intersection of politics, affect and mediatory conventions. I argue that contemporary Nigerian youths, through intimate and sincere revelatory writing practices, model heterotopic structures as correctives to normative orders, and that such Foucauldian spaces, contentiously expressed as space-within-a-space, are realised in, and materialise as, digital literary anthologies. Rethinking the literary anthology as heterotopia discloses seeming incompatible valences in confessional praxis and genre as constituting the kernel of a resistive commune. I tease out such valences by drawing on existing conceptions of publics and heterotopia and reading Thursday’s Children (Adeosun & Bello 2019), a digital anthology of personal essays, as confessional public. The article thinks through genre’s capture by technological regimes, capital and multiple economies of circulation to render confessional public’s techniques of mobilisation. These incompatibilities comprise the anthology’s materiality as negotiating a fusion of aesthetics, feelings-based subjectivity, intimacy and vulnerability. Troubling the ethics of a captured genre renders the paradoxical manoeuvres in writerly practices that hold up shared affective codes of belonging as baselines for agonistic literacies. The article theorises confessional writing as registers of predicaments and emotions whose constitutive contradictions bond writers and their audience to create feelings of intimacy and public.