Literary Birthday – 28 July – Kwame Dawes
Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes, born on 28 July 1962.
Kwame Dawes Quotes
- I work with musicians routinely, and we continue to combine music and poetry in ways that I think are meaningful.
- This poet is a griot in search of a village.
- I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal. As you may know, my motto is: ‘All memory is fiction’. It could just as easily be: ‘All fiction is memory’. Unpacked, these two statements defy the ease of logic, but offer some really important truths about narrative art, at the very least, and about memory. So I would say that all art is personal.
- Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination.
- I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.
Read Kwame Dawes Memo to Poets – A Twitter Journey
Kwame Dawes is Ghana-born poet, actor, editor, critic, and musician, who grew up in Jamaica. He is the author of 30 books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His collections of poetry include Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, Impossible Flying, and Back of Mount Peace. He is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In April 2024, he was named the Poet Laureate of Jamaica. He is a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner.
Photo: Via publicists / credit to © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
by Amanda Patterson
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