Professor of Literary Arts Kwame Dawes began his three-year term as the fourth poet laureate of Jamaica in January, taking on a role that seeks to foster greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry and culture.
The National Library of Jamaica first approached Dawes regarding the possibility of him serving as poet laureate in early 2024, he said. At the time, he was a professor of English at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“I agreed right away, fully honored and touched by the fact that the country that has shaped me as an artist and a human being was going to honor me in this manner,” Dawes wrote in an email to The Herald.
Dawes, who began teaching at Brown in fall 2024, has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction, plays and essays.
LiveHopeLove.com — a Pulitzer Center interactive website based on a multimedia reporting project by Dawes about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica — won an Emmy award in 2009. Dawes has also received the Forward Prize for Poetry for Best First Collection and a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, among numerous other awards.
Dawes, who is half-Ghanaian and half-Jamaican, was born in Ghana and moved to Jamaica when he was young. He attended college in Jamaica before moving to Canada for graduate school and to the United States for work. Since then, Dawes has remained involved in the arts and literary scenes in Jamaica — where his family continues to reside.
“I am proud of being a Jamaican,” Dawes wrote. “I consider this an opportunity to serve Jamaica and to promote and celebrate poetry in Jamaica.”
As poet laureate, Dawes “is tasked with stimulating a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry while aiming to develop mass appeal for poetry as an art and a medium for disseminating (Jamaica’s) cultural heritage,” according to the National Library of Jamaica. The poet laureate will also seek to create “an avenue for public involvement in the spoken arts by stimulating the writing of poetry and improving youth appreciation of poetry.”
Poet laureates serve three-year terms and are nominated for the role by the public. Nominations are then reviewed by a selection committee.
Dawes was inaugurated as Jamaica’s poet laureate at a ceremony in Kingston, Jamaica on Jan. 22.
The ceremony “was full of all the appropriate pomp and ceremony that speaks to the seriousness with which the country views this position,” Dawes wrote. “There is something profoundly civilized about a country that values its poets in this manner.”
Matthew Shenoda, chair of the Department of Literary Arts, said he was “overjoyed” when he found out about Dawes’s appointment. Shenoda was involved in recruiting Dawes to Brown and has worked with him on the African Poetry Book Fund since 2012.
“Dawes is one of the most prolific and renowned writers of his generation who has worked tirelessly to promote the works of African, Caribbean and African American poets across the globe,” Shenoda wrote in an email to The Herald.
Dawes “has maintained a very strong and significant relationship with the island and has worked significantly in the mentoring and support of the literary community there,” Shenoda added.
Sehee Oh ’26 decided to take Dawes’s course LITR 1110X: “Generative Poetry Workshop,” taught this semester, after reading and enjoying his poetry collection “Wheels.” Oh said she was surprised when she discovered that Dawes was Jamaica’s poet laureate.
“He did not tell any of us about it,” she added. “I honestly don’t think he wants to make a big deal of it.”
Shenoda wrote that Dawes’s uniqueness lies in his ability to “render the fullness of people in his work.”
Dawes is “a writer who can work in the most nuanced of global spaces, always relying on a keenly lyrical and human intimacy that is embodied not only in his work, but in his own humanity,” Shenoda added.
