Emmy Award winner Kwame Dawes will be the featured reader at a special St. Andrews Writers’ Forum on Monday at 8 p.m. in Pate Main Lounge, St. Andrews University, Laurinburg.
The forum is free and open to the public.
After a break for Easter, the forum returns to campus for a special reading on Monday, April 1, by Dawes.
“Kwame Dawes is one of the most important writers of his generation who has built a mighty and lasting body of work,” said American poet, essayist and playwright Elizabeth Alexander.
Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Dawes is the award-winning author of 16 books of poetry and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska.
In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on his Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. It has also 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 also won The Forward Prize for Poetry for his first book Progeny of Air.
As a poet, Dawes finds influence from the rhythms and textures of Jamaica, often citing his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” His book, “Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius,” remains one of the most authoritative studies of the lyrics of the musician.
His novel “She’s Gone” was the 2008 winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best First Novel. In 2007, he released “A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative.” His essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals, including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, USA Today and Double Take Magazine. For several years, Dawes was a regular columnist on poetry for the State Magazine in Columbia, S.C.
Dawes is also an actor, playwright, producer, storyteller, broadcaster and lead singer in Ujamaa, a reggae band.
For information about the Writers’ Forum, creative writing or the St. Andrews Press, call 910-277-5310, email press@sapc.edu or visit the website at www.sapc.edu.
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