Nebraska

Kwame Dawes is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and author or editor of numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. Dawes’s most recent books include the poetry collections City of Bones: A Testament and Punto de Burro and the novel Bivouac. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund, editor of the award-winning African Poetry Book Series, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. The winner of numerous awards for his writing and service to the literary community, Dawes was elected a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, and won the prestigious Windham Campbell Award for Poetry in 2019.

"Dawes is no longer a stranger to the middle American landscape, now a welcome newcomer creating space for new voices to be heard."-Luke Hollis, Harvard Review Online "As the poet contemplates the wealth of opportunity that seems innate-now, as well as when the plains people first saw the land, concluding in Prairie that the wide-ranging opportunity must be home to imagination and continual new beginnings. This is where Nebraska meets the poet most intimately, as a place of riches and with a history of new beginnings."-Jordan Charlton, Adriot Journal

• Acknowledgments    IHow I Became an Apostle    Advent    The Barking Geese of Edenton    The Immigrant Contemplates Death    Fledge        Longing for the Hall of the Deaf    The Midwestern Sky    First Winter    Loneliness    Dark Season    Plain-Speaking    Novela        The Scent of the Cankerworm    Dawn        Chadron    Sandoz Revisited    The Enemy of Memory    The Poor Man’s Sacrifice    Bones        Sponge    On History    IIThe Epoch of Lies    Sea and Rain    Purple        Forgetting    The Quality of Light    In These Times    Sugar        “All Teeth and Smile”    Sniper        IIIHalf        Long Distance    Prairie        Pleasure    The Chronicler of Sorrows    July Fourth    IVJasmine    On Blindness    Insomniac    Bed Time    Transplant    Surviving, Again    Sancho Panza    The Messiness of Place    Bone Dust    Ambulation    Falling Away    On Picking Battles    The Exile Remembers His Sisters    Fatigue