Kwame Dawes, an internationally acclaimed poet and professor of English at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, was awarded the biennial PEN/ Nora Magid Award for its publisher at Prairie Schooner.
The award was announced on March 23. Dawes and the other four honorees will be honored during 2021 PEN America’s literary awards ceremony, online at 6pm CDT April 8th.
Dawes has been Glenna Luschei Editor of the Nebraska literary newspaper since arriving at the university in 2011.
He and Prairie Schooner’s editorial team have been working quietly for the past 10 years to revolutionize the 90-year-old magazine – integrating technology into its processes, giving voice to a more diverse range of poets and authors and establishing the magazine as an international presence.
It is gratifying to have these efforts recognized by an organization as internationally renowned as PEN, Dawes said. This is not an award that anyone is applying for, he added.
“National editorial awards are very few; a prize for editing a journal is a unique honor, ”he said. “I didn’t know until I was informed of the award that was being considered for him. It is gratifying that people recognize the work we are doing for Prairie Schooner. Prairie Schooner has been around for 90 years, and journals like ours can be considered obvious. “
Founded in 1922 and headquartered in New York City, PEN America is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate freedom of expression in the United States and around the world through the advancement of literature and human rights.
The biennial PEN/ The Nora Magid Magazine Editing Award recognizes a publisher whose high standards and literary tastes have contributed to the excellence of the publication it publishes. Judges described Dawes as a “bold and visionary editor” who “proved the continuing validity of the literary newspaper and took it to new places”.
“For a decade, (Prairie Schooner) has consistently published works that are rigorous, aesthetically diverse and attractive,” wrote the judges. “At a time when we constantly hear complaints about the death of reading at the hands of technology, Dawes’s work suggests that, with a lot of energy and imagination, the landscape can be reorganized.”
Dawes said the PEN award is particularly significant for him.
“PEN it is a lifeline for many writers around the world, supporting those facing censorship, detention and incarceration for their work, ”said Dawes. “Being associated with an organization with this at its core, I highly value this.”
Dawes was one of five literary luminaries recognized on March 23 PEN announcement. Other honorees were director, playwright and producer George C. Wolfe, PEN/ Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award; Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson, PEN/ Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; multidisciplinary artist and playwright Daniel Alexander Jones, PEN/ Laura Pells International Theater Foundation Award; translator Pierre Joris, PEN/ Manheim Translation Award.
Dawes was born in Ghana and his family moved to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1971, where his father became deputy director of the Institute of Jamaica. He has a doctorate in English from the University of New Brunswick and previously taught at the University of South Carolina, where he was a Resident Poet and director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, among other functions. He is the founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund, an initiative created in 2014 to draw more attention to the work of African poets.
He has won many awards throughout his career, including an Emmy in 2009 for his project to document HIV/ASSISTS in Jamaica, a Pushcart Prize in poetry in 2001 and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Poetry in 2019. He was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2018.
He recently took over the writing for the column for the American Life in Poetry newspaper, created by the poet Ted Kooser of Nebraska in 2005 as we Poet Laureate.
Some of the changes that Dawes led for Prairie Schooner included the adoption of technology in useful and valuable ways to disseminate literature, as well as a conscious effort to internationalize the magazine, while honoring its roots in Nebraska. He credits the leadership of longtime publisher Hilda Raz and poet Glenna Luschei, who provided a donation to cover the magazine’s production costs.
“This created latitude, freedom and stability for the newspaper,” he said. “I inherited this and I am grateful to be an administrator and guardian of this.”
Using a technology called Submittable, the magazine receives submissions from writers from around the world. It is not surprising that an edition contains a poem about soy sauce in Guam along with a short story about a failed marijuana grower set in Michigan.
“It is a newspaper from Nebraska, from the Midwest, from we – but it is valued in the world ”, he said. “Prairie Schooner’s regionalism is a reality, but it is a conversation influenced by those who have their own narratives, going back and forth for miles, for cultures, for regions.”
“Our editors pay attention to regions, to voices, to all the ways people think about themselves. It is not a ‘best of’. I am curating a good reading, once a quarter, with a range of voices, wonderful, well-done and varied literature. That is my goal. “