Poetry. African American Studies. Few poets have managed to enter the horror of Jim Crow America with the fresh insight and sharply honed detail that we see in Dawes's writing. With all good Southern songs of spiritual and emotional truth, Dawes understands that redemption is essential and he finds it in the pure music of his art. Dawes is not an interloper here, but a man who reminds us of the power of the most human and civilizing gift of empathy and the shared memory of the Middle Passage and its aftermath across the black diaspora. Dawes finds meaning in Sumter, South Carolina, as the voices of women who lived through most of the twentieth century unfold with the raw honesty of people who have waited for a long time to finally speak their mind.

Author City: Columbia, SC USA

Kwame Dawes is an award-winning Ghanian-born Jamaican author of several books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He teaches at the University of South Carolina, where he is Distinguished Poet in Residence and director of the USC Arts Institute and the SC Poetry Initiative. Dawes is the programmer for the annual Jamaican Calabash International Literary Festival.