Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with. — Kwame Dawes Copy Share Image
I believe that many lives around us now can reflect this strange pattern of migration and movement. The question is: are we aware of it, and do we embrace it as a kind of birthright? I do. And yet, I feel deeply connected to at least two homespaces - Jamaica and Ghana, and more recently, South Carolina. — Kwame Dawes Copy Share
Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share Image
In reggae I have a model of artistic excellence and possibility that is challenging and inspiring. The poem remains a demanding thing - an object to be understood and shaped into my own sense of self, the same is true of the play, the novel, the short story. Yet, for some reason, I approach these existing genres with the kind… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share
When people open up and share their stories, you have a responsibility to tell these truths truthfully and with the same quest for grace… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share Image
Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today. — Kwame Dawes Copy Share Image
For me, reggae music and its aesthetic are touchstones in both simple and complex ways. Reggae's capacity to be a folk music that is created in a wholly modern context of the recording studio (and sometimes that is the sole performance space) is riddled with the kinds of contradictory impulses that we have come to expect from the post-modern. I… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share
With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. What makes this book as important as anything published in the last decade is the irresistible music, the formal dexterity and the imaginative leaps she makes with metaphor and language in these simply stunning poems. This… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share
HIV is no respecter of persons. Any of us could find ourselves with the disease, and then what? We tend to stigmatize as a… — Kwame Dawes Copy Share Image
