Kwame Dawes

thumb Kwame Senu Neville Dawes CD (born 28 July 1962) is a Ghanaian poet, academic, critic, actor, and musician. He is the former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina and former Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He was appointed Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University in 2024. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series and director of the African Poetry Book Fund. He was editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine from 2011 until 2025. He has published thirty books of poetry, as well as works of fiction, essays, and criticism. His awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a 2009 Emmy Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, Brittle Paper's literary person of the year award, the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2019, and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2025. He is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In April 2024, Dawes was announced as the new Poet Laureate of Jamaica. Quotes I am listening to the wind, to the voice in the wind telling me to write it all down. So I do. If you wait long enough, all murders will have lost their scream, all bloodlines forgotten, all dynamite broken, all storms settled, all bones cleaned of the memory of sin. A lot of people say they want to leave this city to go somewhere else. Not me. I love this place for what it is. Ugly and pretty. Rough and tender. Chaotic and smooth. Loving and murderous. All of it. I am a tornado child. I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day; I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things, carry you to where you’ve never been, and maybe, if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared, heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight. What has been taken from you, it is this that owns you, and you, shell of all joy, must walk through this city as beautiful as the last summer flowers. Yes, I am a fat man, but don't sorry for me. In Jamaica a woman like a big man. She can see he is prosperous, and that he can be in charge. People call you "boss" before they even know who you are. "Big man," "Boss," "Officer," "King," and my favorite, "My Lord." When a woman call you, "My Lord," that is a sweetness. you cross me at your peril, I swallow light when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin, the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations. All memory is fiction. I think writers block is something writers invented to blame something other than the lack of things to say for our failure to write. Responding to art—paintings, sculptures, etc. Writing poems in response to other poems on the white space in a book of poems. Inventing a form and then writing poems in that form for as long as I can stand it. A crown of sonnets. Challenging my language by trying to describe simple but quite difficult things: a taste, a smell, and feeling, in language that is precise and effective. External links Category:1962 births Category:Poets from Ghana