I am a black person. I come out of an experience of exile and migration. I have always felt myself to be at once at home and away from home at the sa…

- Kwame Dawes

I am most interested in people. I try to capture their complexity and contradiction and beauty. It does not matter where they are from.

- Kwame Dawes

As you may know, my motto is: "All memory is fiction." It could just as easily be: "All fiction is memory." Unpacked, these two statements defy the e…

- Kwame Dawes

This poet is a griot in search of a village.

- Kwame Dawes

The rich and complex history of South Carolina is the history of the African diaspora, and in many ways, I felt acutely the sense of this collective …

- Kwame Dawes

All memory is fiction.

- Kwame Dawes

I believe that all fiction is personal and all writing is at some level personal.

- Kwame Dawes

With Head Off & Split, Nikky Finney establishes herself as one of the most eloquent, urgent, fearless and necessary poets writing in America today. W…

- Kwame Dawes

Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art…

- Kwame Dawes