From staff reports
In conjunction with National Poetry Month and a Calvin Christian Institute Worshiping Communities Grant, Penn Center, Inc., will host a presentation and workshop by world renowned poet Kwame Dawes.
Dawes will be featured in a program called Exploring Poetry In The Bible Through The Lens Of The Gullah Translation Of The New Testament from 10:30 a.m. to noon on Saturday, April 23 at the Brick Baptist Church at 85 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive on St. Helena Island.
The presentation will explore select passages from the Gullah translated New Testament Bible, King James Version. This event is free and open to the public, and young and old are welcome.
The event is for writers and poets and lovers of the spoken word in the Bible. Light refreshments will be available.
Dawes was born in Ghana and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. He received a BA from the University of the West Indies at Mona in 1983 and went on to study and teach in New Brunswick, Canada, on a Commonwealth Scholarship. In 1992, he received a PhD in English from the University of New Brunswick.
He received the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 1994 for Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree Press). Dawes is also the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Bivouac (Peepal Tree Press Ltd, 2010), and non-fiction, including the memoir A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (Peepal Tree Press, 2006).
Dawes’ many honors include the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for service to the arts in South Carolina, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, the Musgrave Silver Medal for contribution to the Arts in Jamaica, the Poets & Writers Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry.
In 2009, he won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on his Pulitzer Center project, “HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica.”
Until July 2011, Dawes was Distinguished Poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and founder, and executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He was the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. Dawes is currently the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska, where he is a Chancellor’s Professor of English, a faculty member of Cave Canem, and a teacher in the Pacific MFA Program in Oregon. He is co-founder and programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year.
In all, he has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays.
