Poetry Reading Series: Kwame Dawes and Jennifer Barber

Join the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at CGS and BU Center for the Humanities for a poetry reading featuring poets Kwame Dawes and Jennifer Barber.

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. He is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of Ghana, citing in an interview his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” Indeed, his book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Of his sixteen collections of poetry, his most recent titles include Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Duppy Conqueror (Copper Canyon, 2013), shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award; Wheels (2011); Back of Mount Peace (2009); Hope’s Hospice (2009); Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying (2007); and Gomer’s Song (2007). Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in the UK. Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001 for his long poem, “Inheritance.” His seventeenth collection, City of Bones, was published in 2017 along with two UK releases Vuelo: Poemas, a translation of Gustavo Osorio and Speak from Here to There: Poems written along with John Kinsella. He was also among the 2018 recipients for the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry.

https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/kwame-dawes/

Jennifer Barber’s most recent poetry collection is The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made (Word Works, 2022). Her previous books are Works on Paper, winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize (Word Works, 2016), Given Away (Kore Press, 2012), and Rigging the Wind (Kore Press, 2003). She is co-editor, with Fred Marchant and Jessica Greenbaum, of the anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems (Grayson Books, 2022). In 1992 she founded the journal Salamander and served as its editor through 2018. She is the current poet laureate of Brookline; her poems have appeared widely in journals and magazines, including Poetry, the Paris Review, the New Yorker, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and Orion.

https://jenniferbarber.org/