Sheldon Museum of Art Main Content

Celebrated author and editor Kwame Dawes – and recently appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica — will read from his new book of poetry. Sturge Town is a stunning collection that connects with the earliest days of Kwame Dawes’ work as a poet, from the roots of childhood in Ghana to the reflections of a man turned 60 who is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered his own.

The site of the ruined ancestral home of Dawes’ family, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is at once a place of myth and, for Dawes, a metaphor of the journeying that has taken him from Ghana, through Jamaica and to Nebraska. The poet ranges through time, pursued by a keen sense of mortality and engages in an intimate dialogue with the reader — serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. Whether finding beauty in the quotidian or taking astonishing imaginative leaps, these poems speak movingly of self-reflection, family crises, loss, transcendence, the shattering realities of political engagement and an unremitting investment in the vivid indeterminacy of poetry.

Dawes is the author of 22 books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism and essays. A member of the creative writing faculty in the UNL Department of English, he is Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner and a George W. Holmes University Professor. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry.

This UNL Creative Writing event is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.