Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. Dawes’s work reporting on HIV/AIDS in Haiti after the earthquake formed a key component of reporting done by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting that won the National Press Club Joan Friedenberg Award for Online Journalism and was released as Voices of Haiti (2012). Dawes is currently the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. The co-founder and programming directory of the Calabash International Literary Fesitval, he also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing Program and is on the faculty of Cave Canem.
More By This Poet
Vagrants and Loiterers
You got that clean waistcoat,
the bright white of a well-tailored
shirt, you got those loose-as-sacks
slacks and some spit-polished shoes,
and you know, whether you are looking
like money, or about to take a stroll,
to tilt that hat like you own
the world; yeah, smoke...
Horns
In every crowd, there is the one
with horns, casually moving through
the bodies as if this is the living
room of a creature with horns,
a long cloak and the song of tongues
on the lips of the body. To see
the horns, one’s heart...