Visiting Writer Kwame Dawes shares his work with the VSC community in February 2016. Kwame was born in Ghana in 1962 and spent much of his childhood in Jamaica. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country, Impossible Flying, Back of Mount Peace, Hope’s Hospice, Wheels, and Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems. Dawes’ novels include She’s Gone, and Bivouac, and his non-fiction collections include A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative, and Fugue and Other Writings. He is also the author of Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius, a study of the musician’s lyrics. Awards include an Emmy and Webby for Live Hope Love, an interactive website based on the Kwame Dawes Pulitzer Prize Center project HOPE: Living and Loving with AIDS in Jamaica; the Forward Prize for Poetry; the Hollis Summers Prize for Poetry; a Pushcart Prize; and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, among others. Dawes currently serves as Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Kwame's visit was sponsored, in part, by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
