MFA Instructor Kwame Dawes Wins Prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry

MFA Faculty Member Kwame Dawes was honored for his poetry by the judges of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prizes. The award was announced in London during the week of the London Book Fair.

The judges applauded Dawes for his entire body of work, which includes 20 books of poetry and multiple other publications. They described him as "a daring ventriloquist with a polymathic intelligence, and his expansive body of work shows lyric mastery, narrative force, and a profound sense of the historical and geographic roots of poetry."

Dawes, who was born in Ghana and grew up in Jamaica, is an instructor for Pacific's low-residency Masters of Fine Arts in Writing program and teaches full time at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His honors include the Forward Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, the Musgrave Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a founder of the African Poetry Book Fund, co-founder of the Calabash International Literary Festival, and a former Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, and now is the Glenna Luschei Editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner.