Kwame Dawes

Kwame Senu Neville Dawes (born 28 July 1962) is a Ghanaian poet, academic, critic, actor, and musician. He is the former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina and former Professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He was appointed Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University in 2024. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series and director of the African Poetry Book Fund. He was editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine from 2011 until 2025. He has published thirty books of poetry, as well as works of fiction, essays, and criticism. His awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a 2009 Emmy Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, Brittle Paper's literary person of the year award, the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2019, and the National Books Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2025. He is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In April 2024, Dawes was announced as the new poet laureate of Jamaica.