Kwame Dawes
Emmy-winning Jamaican Poet & Writer
“The poet's language is vivid and visceral; his courage and honesty blaze a path in poem after poem. This is the music of survival and transcendence. Indeed, the poetry of Kwame Dawes makes the impossible possible.” —Martin Espada
“Kwame Dawes is one of the most important writers of his generation who has built a mighty and lasting body of work...” —Elizabeth Alexander
“Majestic is the word that comes to mind reading the finely wrought poems of Kwame Dawes... a sublime talent is needed to fashion poems of such capacious grace and energy." —Terrance Hayes
Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. He is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley.
Dawes has published fifteen collections of poetry. His most recent titles include Back of Mount Peace (2009); Hope's Hospice (2009); Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying (2007); and Gomer's Song (2007). Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in the UK. Other poetry collections include Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane, 1995); Prophets (Peepal Tree, 1995); Jacko Jacobus, (Peepal Tree, 1996); and Requiem, (Peepal Tree. 1996), a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist, Tom Feelings in his landmark book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo; and Shook Foil (Peepal Tree, 1998), a collection of reggae-inspired poems. His book, Midland, was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press (2001). In 2001, Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001 for his long poem, "Inheritance."
He has also published two novels: Bivouac (2009) and She's Gone (2007, Akashic Books), winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for best First Novel. In 2007 he released A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (Peepal Tree Books). His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today, and Double Take Magazine.
In September 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on Kwame Dawes's Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. It has won other accolades including a People's Voice Webby Award, and was the inspiration for the music/spoken word performance Wisteria & HOPE which premiered at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina.
Dawes is an actor, playwright, and producer, an accomplished storyteller, broadcaster, and was the lead singer in Ujamaa, a reggae band. To date, he has seen produced fifteen of his plays; and he has acted in, directed or produced several of these productions, most recently a production of his musical, One Love, at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Commissioned by Talawa, Britian's leading black theatre company, and inspired by Rogert Mais' classic novel Brotherman, One Love takes us to the heart of the Jamaican soul, as actors, dancers, singers, life musicians, and a DJ draw on influences such as Bob Marley and Lee "Scratch" Perry to tell this powerful parable of desire and denial.
Through the years, Dawes has collaborated with musicians and artists to create a dynamic series of performances based on his poetry that have proven to be some of the most compelling and challenging presentations of poetry being performed today. Wisteria is a multimedia performance with composer Kevin Simmonds, who set the poems from Dawes’ book of the same name, to music. The result is an evening length performance that explores the life of women who lived through the Jim Crow period in Sumter, South Carolina.
Dawes is Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and founder and executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year.
He is a regular blogger for the Poetry Foundation; his blogs can be read at www.poetryfoundation.org.
About BIVOUAC (2010)
When his father dies in suspicious circumstances, Ferron Morgan's trauma is increased by the conflict within his family and his father's friends over whether the death is the result of medical negligence or a political assassination. Ferron has lived in awe of his father's radical commitments but is forced to admit that, with the 1980's resurgence of the political Right in the Caribbean, his father had lost faith, and was 'already dead to everything that had meaning for him'. Ferron's response to the death is further complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancée, Dolores, from a brutal rape. He begins, though, to investigate the direction of his life with great intensity, in particular to confront his instinct to keep moving on and running from trouble. This is a sharply focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society's scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation. For both Ferron and the society there has been the loss of 'the corpse of one's origins' and the novel points to the need to find a way back before there can be a movement forward.
About BACK OF MOUNT PEACE (2009)
A retired fisherman, Monty Cupidon, encounters a naked, bloodied and traumatized woman standing at the cross-roads. He offers comfort and takes her in. Suffering from amnesia, she cannot tell him anything about herself. The only clues are the signs that she has once worn a wedding ring, has a butterfly tattoo and red nail polish on her toes. In the absence of memory, he names her Esther. So begins a remarkable sequence of poems that explores many dimensions of liminality. Back of Mount Peace occupies a space between lyric and narrative, between reflection and story. It explores the space between body and mind, making Esther's halting discovery of her self through her body, which like a tree bears its indelible history and, unlike the mind, 'doesn't forget its grievances', work both as moving narrative device and a deeply sensed and sensual reminder of the physicality of existence. Above all, this is a sequence that explores a relationship which begins in a primal Edenic space of innocent discovery in which, as Monty hopes, 'the hallelujah's of new love will begin', but which, like all relationships must enter history, the decay of time and the corruptions of knowledge. In the use of rhyme and other patterns of sound, Back of Mount Peace shows an exceptional delicacy of formal control that constantly reinforces the poem's insights and moving conclusions.
About HOPE'S HOSPICE (2009)
When Kwame Dawes was sent to Jamaica to write a piece reporting the incidence and treatment of HIV/Aids, his visits to support centers and the hospice outside Montego Bay brought him into frank dialogue with both sufferers and their carers, and it is from these conversations that this collection of poems grew. Whilst the introduction of retrovirals has confronted sufferers with the problem of how to live, the hospice is still full of the memories of the recent years when AIDS was a rapid sentence of death. Powerfully illustrated by Joshua Cogan's photographs, the art of Dawes's poems makes it impossible to see AIDs as something that only happens to other people, and to marginalise their lives. Here, AIDs becomes the channel along which pass the universal dramas, the archetypal voices, the stoicism, despairs and deceptions of the lives encountered.
