Guernica / The Harmonizer

A pretty schweet interview with Kwame Dawes by Camille Goodison in last month's Guernica:

The Harmonizer

Camille Goodison interviews Kwame Dawes December 2011

The Emmy Award–winning poet and crisis reporter on Haiti’s continuing struggles and Jamaica’sAIDS crisis, how Afro-Caribbean music has influenced the writing of V.S. Naipaul and Langston Hughes, and his new role as editor of Prairie Schooner.

... For nineteen years, home for Dawes was South Carolina, where he founded the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. One of his latest anthologies, Home Is Where presents the poetry of over two dozen poets from the Carolinas writing about the South as home. Two recent anthologies, Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry and Jubilation: An Anthology of Poetry Celebrating Fifty Years of Jamaican Independence continues this work featuring the writing of international poets from a variety of schools.

Dawes now teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he is also editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner.

—Camille Goodison for Guernica

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 form I like to play with.

Click here to read the rest.