Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016 his book, Speak from Here to There, a co-written collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared. His most recent collection is City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern University Press, 2017). He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and teaches at the University of Nebraska and the Pacific MFA Program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Reading List
Derision
Until you arrived with your accoutrements, white man, causing the girls to cover their mouths, I was quarreling with the porridge seller and rocking this boy to sleep with my stamping dance—it always works. Don’t be fooled by my eyes. Sometimes the beginning of derision looks like fear. Instead think of these lips opening in […]
After the Wedding
For us there is deep under the skin a kind of desire, not one we will ever indulge, but one we will always think of as a longing. A man, though liberated, feels a welling in him when his woman makes him a plate; this is a kind of weakness, though it is the language […]