Kwame Dawes Quotes

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

This poet is a griot in search of a village.

When people open up and share their stories, you have a responsibility to tell these truths truthfully and with the same quest for grace and beauty that you see in them.

All memory is fiction.

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.

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

Latino poets, are really having a significant impact on American poetics today.

My concern is always that I can do justice to what I see and hear.

The aesthetic, as I understand it, is really about the way in which we understand beauty and speak and think about beauty.

Racist writing is a craft failure.

Our goal is to publish African poets in as many ways as possible.

One of the blessings and curses of my life is that I carry so many projects at the same time.

HIV is no respecter of persons. Any of us could find ourselves with the disease, and then what? We tend to stigmatize as a way to deceive ourselves about our invincibility. But it is a delusion.

There is no access to contemporary poetry in the libraries.