{"title":"Kwame Dawes","description":"Kwame Senu Neville Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962 but grew up in Jamaica where he attended Jamaica College and the University of the West Indies at Mona. He studied and taught in New Brunswick on a Commonwealth Scholarship to Canada. Since 1992 he has been teaching at the University of South Carolina. He is Professor of English on the Columbia campus of that institution.\n\nHis critical articles on literature, theater and film have been published widely. He is an actor playwright and producer, an accomplished storyteller, broadcaster and was the lead singer in Ujamaa, a reggae band. To date, Kwame Dawes has seen produced fifteen of his plays and he has acted in, directed or produced several of these productions.","products":[{"product_id":"the-north-47-25-years-in-the-north","title":"The North 47: 25 Years in the North","description":"\"Stars in the north are seen not to set.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePoems, articles, reviews and features - including 25 year poems and reflections on 25 years of poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePlus Poets I Go Back To, The Collection and Blind Criticism. \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Smith\/Doorstop (The Poetry Business)","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1040766284,"sku":"22305-0269-9885","price":8.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_71c19a2f-369e-4395-8bcb-aadb933a4eed.jpeg?v=1752237112"},{"product_id":"red-contemporary-black-british-poetry","title":"Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry","description":"\u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e is a powerful new anthology of work by Black British poets.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Perhaps the most significant thing to be said about \u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e is that the poets in this volume burst through any constraining label with writing that throbs and pulses and seeps and flows.\" \u003cbr\u003eMargaret Busby\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e collects poems that engage 'red', poems by Black British poets writing with the word 'red' in mind—as a kind of leap-off point, a context, a germ—the way something small, minor, or grand might spur a poem. It offers the reader the freedom to come to whatever conclusions they want to about what writing as a poet who is also Black and British might mean.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe result is a book of poets ranging from well-established and published writers to first time poets. \u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e does find its usual associations with blood, violence, passion, and anger. Sometimes it is linked with sensuality and sexuality. But there are surprises, when red defines a memory or mood, the quality of light in a sky, the colour of skin, the sound of a song, and much, much more. The anthology, therefore, succeeds in producing poems that seem to be first about image, and only then about whatever else fascinates the poet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this sense, \u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e is a different kind of anthology of Black British writing, and the richness of the entries, the moods, the humour, the passion, the reflection, the confessional all confirm that Black British poetry is a lively and defining force in Britain today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEditor Kwame Dawes is a poet, novelist, playwright and critic. His work as an organiser and deliverer of poetry workshops has been hailed in many parts of the world, not least in the UK, USA and Jamaica, where he has been the Literary programmer of the Calabash International Literature Festival for the past ten years. His work as an editor received wide praise for \u003ci\u003eWheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRed\u003c\/i\u003e is published by Inscribe, an imprint of Peepal Tree. The Inscribe Series Editor is Kadija Sesay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eKwame Dawes\u003c\/b\u003e is widely acknowledged as the foremost Caribbean poet of the post-Walcott generation. He currently holds the position of Distinguished Poet In Residence and Louise Fry Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041100660,"sku":"9781845231293","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_58dc73c3-5255-4b26-8256-25d89c3a0037.jpeg?v=1752237646"},{"product_id":"the-children-of-sisyphus","title":"The Children of Sisyphus","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Children of Sisyphus\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of Dinah, a prostitute who lives and fails to find love on the Dungle, the rubbish heap where the very poorest squat. Trapped by patriarchy and male passivity, and cursed by one of her rivals, Dinah is forced into a panicked flight to save herself. But involvement with a revival church and the favour of Shepherd John, who proposes a new life outside Jamaica, leads her to the delusion that she has found escape and meaning, a lived lie that has tragic consequences.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Patterson’s brutally poetic existentialist novel, dignity comes with a stoic awareness of the absurdity of life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduced by Kwame Dawes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOrlando Patterson\u003c\/b\u003e was born in Jamaica in 1940. Having studied at the University of the West Indies and at the London School of Economics, in 1970 he took the position of Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard, where he is now John Cowles Professor of Sociology. \u003ci\u003eThe Children of Sisyphus\u003c\/i\u003e received the First Prize for Fiction at the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts in 1966. His other novels are \u003ci\u003eAn Absence of Ruins\u003c\/i\u003e (1967) and \u003ci\u003eDie the Long Day\u003c\/i\u003e (1972). He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999.","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Book","offer_id":1041118500,"sku":"9781845230944","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/2_2_e61f8e8c-c377-4650-b8b7-b46de8f18a87.jpeg?v=1752237633"},{"product_id":"prophets-second-edition","title":"Prophets (Second Edition)","description":"\u003cp\u003eAs 24-hour television, belching out the swaggering voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation. Thalbot has fallen from comfort and security onto the streets. With his wild, matted hair and nakedness, he is a deranged voice in the wilderness. Whilst Clarice has her blue-eyed Jesus, Thalbot brandishes his blackness in the face of every passer-by. Clarice's visions give her power; Thalbot is at the mercy of every wandering spirit. But when, under cover of darkness, Clarice 'sins' on the beach, Thalbot alone knows of her fall. He sets out to journey, like Jonah, to denounce the prophetess and warn the Ninevite city of its coming doom. An epic struggle begins...\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":41560701193,"sku":"9781845234041","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/products\/Peepal_Tree_Press_-_Prophets.jpg?v=1752241495"},{"product_id":"sturge-town","title":"Sturge Town","description":"\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSturge Town is a stunning collection of poems 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 sixty who is witnessing his children occupying the space he once considered his own.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eIt ranges from poems that make something special of the everyday, to poems of the most astonishing imaginative leaps. There are poems that speak most movingly of moments of acute self-reflection, family crises and losses through death, and there are the inventive poems of the dramatist drawn to create the stories of a rich variety of characters, many springing from the observation of paintings.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eMetrically careful and sonorous, these poems engage in a personal dialogue with the reader, serious, confessional, alarmed and sometimes teasing. They create highly visualised spaces, observed, remembered, imagined, the scenes of both outward and inner journeys. Organised in five sections, Sturge Town is a collection of finely shaped individual poems with the architecture of a densely interconnected whole, with the soaring grandeur and intimacy of a cathedral – both above and below ground.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eAs the site of the ruined ancestral home of the Dawes, in one of the earliest post-slavery free villages in Jamaica, Sturge Town is both an actual place, a place of myth and a metaphor of the journeying that has taken Kwame Dawes from Ghana, through Jamaica, through South Carolina and now to Nebraska. It parallels a journeying through time, both personal, family and ancestral in which a keen sense of mortality makes life all the more precious.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Peepal Tree Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47456263274785,"sku":"9781845235741","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0441\/7369\/files\/original_e2aee1e7-2939-4725-9385-3dd7f50d8bf3.jpg?v=1752241191"}],"url":"https:\/\/inpressbooks.co.uk\/collections\/kwame-dawes\/michael-drayton.oembed","provider":"Inpress Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}