Interview with Kwame Dawes
Kadija George
Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana to a Ghanaian mother and Jamaican father, novelist and poet Neville Dawes, who was born in Nigeria. He spent his formative years in Jamaica, describing himself as ‘completely Pan-African’. Equally, he is ‘completely a poet’. His life, he says, makes no sense if poetry is not part of it, something reflected in his founding of the African Poetry Book Fund in 2014. With the nurturing of poets at its core, the strands to the organisation are: a classic series, critical poetry series, translation series, research on mechanisms to distribute poetry in Africa, and archiving content on African poetry to form a hub for African poetics, housed at the University of Nebraska, where Dawes teaches. APBF celebrates its tenth anniversary with the publication of The Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry by the University of Nebraska Press. Dawes has been contracted by Gale to produce a two-volume Dictionary of Literary Biography on African Poets.
Kwame Dawes: The APBF began when Chris Abani and I were in southern Africa in 2011 as part of a tour of African poets with ‘Poetry Africa’, touring South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It was exciting and had a number of people from Senegal, South Africa… like Lebo Mashile and T. J. Dema. We were touched by how much good poetry we were listening to. We asked T. J. and Lebo about work they had published. Lebo had already published a couple of books, but it had been a few years since she had had anything out, but we thought their work should be available abroad. So, the idea began with us thinking, how can we make this happen? Both Chris and I had been involved in other initiatives independently. I’d been working in South Carolina and Jamaica, publishing first Caribbean and then South Carolonian poets. I had developed a model of collaborating with publishing houses. I convinced them that we would underwrite the production costs if they were willing to publish the works so that they would not lose money as there is always anxiety about losing money publishing poetry.
The goal was that over time they would slowly start to acquire and take over the costs, so we decided to start out by trying to partner APBF with other publishers. We realised that the reason why African poets were not being published was because editors [outside Africa] did not know what to do with African poetry, they would either get anxious that they had no context to assess it, or they just didn’t know that there were poets in Africa. It was as ridiculous as that. This was the model we floated around to a number of places. Initially, Slapering Hol Press agreed to work with us, and finally, the University of Nebraska Press agreed to do the chapbooks as a series.
I was being awarded the Barnes and Noble ‘Writers for Writers Award’ presented at the Poets & Writers’ annual gala in New York when I met Laura Sillerman. Because we had the plan, I announced it when I said thank you for the award… ‘but what I need is money because I have this great idea…’, and after the event, this is almost like legend, this woman walks up to me who I never knew, and said how much do you need? And I just said, we could do with $50k and she said, ‘Okay, you got it. I’ll get that for you.’ Then she said, ‘here is my card, call me tomorrow.’ She walks off and I look at the back of the card and it says, ‘I’m not drunk, this is serious.’ This started a relationship with philanthropists Laura Sillerman and her husband who gave us $50k a year for two years. This is what we used to start supplementing the cost of the publications.
After a while we got some funding from the university and individual donors. The editorial team is an amazing team of people like Bernardine Evaristo, Aracelis Girmay, Gabeba Baderoon, Mathew Shenoda, Chris Abani, John Keene, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, and myself. That team has been doing this for the last eight years. Everything that is published goes through that team, they review it, discuss it and University of Nebraska said, as you have such high calibre people, we’ll treat that board as the editorial board.
The idea has generated a Mellon grant of $750,000 and a major grant from The Poetry Foundation of $350,000; the Mellon grant is wrapping up now, a digital humanities project and so with all the arms – the translation series, the critical series, a classic series, the libraries – we’ve done quite a bit of work and maintained it. The numbers are remarkable as we’ve published about 180 African poets in less than 10 years.
Kadija George: So you’ve published enough for a generation or more?
KD: Absolutely. In the 40 years of Heinemann, their total number of titles was about 386, with very little poetry at all.
1 Khadija Nguanya Koroma, ‘Women and the Heinemann African Writers’ series. (PhD, University of Leicester, 2023). In her Introduction, Koroma states 360 titles. She notes that their first poetry anthology, Poems of Black Africa, by Wole Soyinka in 1975 was published 13 years after HAWS was founded. Its 346 poems includes only two poems written by one woman, Noemia de Sousa. A notable comparison to the number of African women poets published by APBF. Two things I think that have accelerated this process, is a good strategy, the APBF board as a team with the technology. We’ve never actually physically met; we’ve done it all online. We’ve had one Zoom meeting, otherwise it is just email, exchanging and having robust discussions. Tech has been remarkable and the association with the university where we have access to a great deal of students who have come into our PhD programme as writers from Africa, have become part of our research programme for the various projects that we do. I get excited about what has been achieved so far, the quality of the work and the work we are publishing is stunning and we’ve made a concerted effort to celebrate African art on all the covers.
KG: Have you achieved what you expected to have achieved at your 10 year anniversary?
KD: I think we have done more than we expected, but I must say that when we look back at the initial plan, pretty much all of these steps have been followed. We haven’t veered away from our expectations, and they have been incremental. We have exceeded our expectations – I say this because we couldn’t anticipate the number of people submitting work; we couldn’t anticipate what the prizes would do. When we started the Sillerman Prize, which is a first book prize, Bernardine [Evaristo] in the UK, independent of what we were doing, started the Brunel Prize at the same time, so having her on board and us starting to work together, we couldn’t have anticipated that but that was transformative and now we’ve taken over the Brunel prize and doing it as the Evaristo Prize. That combination has allowed us to generate a tremendous amount of interest. We said we wanted to publish four or five titles a year and we are now up to five or six. From the beginning, we wanted to do translation work, but it’s taken a while and now we are starting to generate a lot of translation work. We’ve been translating for about five years, some French, for example with Tanella Boni [Ivorian poet], but also from indigenous languages, in Swahili and so on. An area that we knew from the beginning we had to do but which we couldn’t build immediately was a critical series that looks at the work we are publishing. We started that series with Matthew Shenoda leading it.
2 Adil Babikir, The Beauty Hunters: Sudanese Bedouin Poetry, Evolution and Impact, Nebraska University Press, 2023. The first book published in the ‘On African Poetry’ series. He started about three years ago and I’ve started to publish work that responds to it so I would say the vision is solid and clear. So few poets were being published and had so little access to publications. Of our senior poets across Africa, there were none who had collective works. Since then [2014], we’ve published Okara, Awoonor, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Kgositsile. We’ve been steadily publishing these collective works by the major African poets, but I think the greatest impact that was intended was not that we would become a publishing entity. I never envisaged us becoming a publishing house per se and you can see that the way we have designed it was not to become a publishing house but to partner with publishers, to generate in the UK, the US, and in Africa the interest in African poetry.
We did a survey and called editors and said, ‘what do you know about African poetry?’ To a person they said, ‘well we can think of novelists, we can’t think of poets,’ and that told me that with that absence of any kind of knowledge and even if you Googled it at the time, you were seeing stuff that was 20–30 years old, nothing contemporary. None of the major publishers, Oxford, Cambridge, Norton’s, Bedford/St. Martin’s, none of them have done an anthology of African poets. It’s shocking!
3 Heinemann’s later poetry anthologies were, Adewale Maja-Pierce, ed., The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (African Writers Series) Heinemann, African Writers Series (1990); K.L. Goodwin, Understanding African Poetry: A study of ten poets, London, 1982; Frank and Stella Chipasula, The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry (African Writers Series), London, 1995.When you think about what was said, what needs to happen is that we need to flood the market with books of poetry. We knew that the quality would be there because we’d seen it, and soon, what we knew would happen is that publishers would start publishing and almost to a fault, all the chapbook writers that we published within a year or two, are now with a major publisher; with Copper Canyon, with Graywolf, and they are getting picked up as they have a calling card. Now there is a wave – it is not a faddish wave – it’s a wave that says, ‘now there is a knowledge base for this work.’ This is intentional. What I didn’t anticipate is, many of the poets who we published are getting offers and interest from other places, yet insisting that they come back to us. They want APBF to publish them, when I ask why, they say, ‘We are forming a family here,’ so it’s very telling. Part of it is the editorial attention that they get, which they still can’t get from the major places, and I think they like the idea of the freedom it gives them to move back and forth. So, people like Romeo Oriogun, Saddiq Dzukogi, all of these people keep coming back to us. Others like Safia Elhilo, are being published in major places, and Warsan [Shire] blew up of course with
Lemonade.4 Safia Elhilo’s latest poetry collection is Girls That Never Die, Penguin Random House, 2022. Warsan Shire’s latest collection is Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, Chatto & Windus, 2022.But it’s a tough model because I still have to find subvention costs, a few thousand dollars for each book that we publish. I’m committed to that; I don’t have a problem underwriting African poetry. Underwriting poetry, I think is valid, but I think eventually, publishers are trusting that there is a real body of work.
KG: The fact that you went to major publishers and asked them what they think about African poetry, and they didn’t know anything, do you think that is part of the historic belief that major publishers in Britain in the 50s/60s made a conscious decision that they would publish fiction, but they would not publish poetry?
5 Caroline Davis, Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. KD: I think there are really interesting philosophical and economic reasons why African poetry has had so tragically little attention over the years, but I think that is changing.
One of the things that I’m preparing is a series of lectures on African poetry and the work we are doing. I wanted to look into Heinemann as Heinemann is really pivotal.
6 Since the announcement in 2003 that Heinemann African Writers Series would not be publishing further titles, it has been relaunched twice. In 2023, Head of Zeus relaunched 100 of the classic titles as the Apollo Africa list.Heinemann published, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart before they had anything to do with Africa, but it wasn’t selling; it certainly wasn’t selling in Africa, so Heinemann decided to form a distribution mechanism in Africa, essentially, to sell Things Fall Apart. They came up with an idea which we are thinking a lot about because we are doing a major research project on book distribution.
KG: It is interesting as well, that you have done that comparison with Heinemann as APBF is in some ways like a reflection of what the Heinemann series was. What do you want it to be? Or would you rather not be compared to Heinemann?
7 Kadija Sesay, ‘Does Anyone Miss Heinemann African Writers Series?’ Journal of African Literature (2006). KD: I think it must be compared to Heinemann because of what we can learn from Heinemann and also the work we decide to do, to what is a colonial reckoning. We are publishing from outside of Africa, so there is the danger of falling into this colonial pattern. One of the things we do to fight that is the dominance of our leadership and the outfit is run by Africans, we’ve been very committed to that, but the other thing is that we have to recognize the control that Heinemann could assert was because they came in during colonialism, so they had readymade access to the relationship between the UK and these African countries.
8 Kadijattu George, ‘Black British Publishers and Pan-Africanism: 1960–1980’ (PhD, University of Brighton-England, 2022). British book publishers continued to benefit from their colonial relationships as it moved to one of neo-colonialism, supported by The British Council. Those channels are completely gone so we know that we can’t get into the education game in the same way except country by country, so then the question is, what distribution is in Africa currently? How does poetry move and our research is looking at poetry. How are poetry books published in Africa, published out of Africa by Africans? How are these books distributed?
9 Olayinka Adekola, Jacob Anderson, Joel Cabrita, Katlo Gasewagae, Bena Habtamu, Brittany Linuus, Bary Miggot, Michelle Ng, Anita Too and Kyle Wang, eds., ImprintAfrica: Conversations with African Women Publishers, Huza Press, 2024. We interviewed hundreds of people writers, editors, festival directors, booksellers – we’ve been interviewing people from Egypt to South Africa to get a picture of it and we’ve got some beautiful useful reports.
A global approach [to distribution] may not work, it has to be a localised arrangement. It is harder to manage that arrangement because every one of these things have to function in a certain way, but increasingly, my sense is, I can’t think we’ve concluded exactly what the mechanism is. We started with Amalion Publishing in Senegal and that has worked relatively well. They thought they could do all of West Africa, but it hasn’t worked out that way, so they get Senegal, they might get Nigeria because the director is Nigerian [Sulaiman Adebowale], so it helps but the problem of course is that these individual publishers are trying to make their own money, but we are using a completely nonprofit mechanism. Our writers get 20% of royalties for the first thousand copies that they sell to give them a strong kickstart and then after that they get seven per cent, which is really decent. Publishers in other places will not do that but we are not-for-profit and they are for profit so how do we work in ways that could benefit them? It is a big question that we’re still trying to answer and then we ask ourselves, are there booksellers that publishers will trust – this is one of the problems – publishers don’t trust the booksellers in Africa because they say, well you know, you can send the books and then the books don’t sell, they never send them back.
So, the question, is do we develop a fund, that will underwrite all of those fields, in other words, we’ll say to the publishers, send them, if you lose, we will underwrite that cost and we will work with the distribution in Africa. Penguin said they won’t do it anymore. If we can recreate trust with booksellers, especially for festivals for example, that might be a way for poetry books, but we don’t know so these are the things that we are trying to test out to see whether they will work. South Africans don’t necessarily trust sending books to Nigeria, for instance, for the same reasons. South Africa has a lot of poetry small presses that are fairly successful, but they do not distribute outside of southern Africa. So again, if you want anything from South Africa, you have to go through Amazon.
KG: I don’t know if the poetry presses are using – you know Zukiswa [Wanner] set up a WhatsApp distribution system.
10 The Book Fam Africa collective receives a discount with DHL in more than 40 countries to send books to other African countries. It has also been useful as a platform to find translators which enables co-publishing. KD: I think so, and there are a number of – even though they don’t do a lot of poetry – there are a number of outfits in the UK. If you Google book distribution in Africa, there are about three companies in the UK. The good news is because we are focused on poetry, it allows us to make a clear and specific kind of investigation, the results of which will affect all genres but the focus on the poetry allows it to be manageable about who we ask, who we talk to and what is happening, but it’s the big frontier for us to understand.
KG: Distribution is key. It’s about ownership and the power of that, so if we don’t control it, it’s never going to happen, so I think if people see you can get a handle on it for poetry, they will be so surprised, they will want to follow and see how the model works.
Can you talk about the successes and achievements of APBF – what has been a challenge that you didn’t expect?
KD: One of the big challenges was funding. Because of the structure, which requires me to find funding to subvent costs also finding funding to pay for permissions. When we are doing these collections, we have to get permissions and we have to find the money for it. We’ve surmounted that challenge, but we still need a secure endowment or something like that, that would allow us to continue to function. Our grant writing mechanism was also a challenge, but we increased the team of people who can work on that area, so we’ve been doing very well on grant writing. The projects like translation are very interesting because when you want to lead the process and say, ‘look we want more indigenous work,’ you have to start commissioning and commissioning requires you to find funding to pay people to do the translation.
KG: In, the next 10 years, where are you hoping to be? Funding is probably always going to be a challenge, but apart from that?
KD: It will be, but I don’t worry about the funding because I think the brand has created a lot of good will and also funding as you know, is a strategy. Succession is very important to us, and I think we built it into the system of the editorial team. I’m senior, Chris is senior, although at this point, we still have some years, but you know we have people like Matthew, John, all of these people who remain interested in it. I think one of the things we are developing is how to secure the APBF’s function and role for the future so that it continues adapting to what the need is. Our first situation was absence – a complete absence of work on African poetry, even contemporary African poetry.
We are starting to fix that. One of the fascinating realities is, in the work that we’ve been doing, on archiving African poetry and creating a hub of African poetry, one of the interesting ‘discoveries’ has been the hunt that many studies have been done on African poetry throughout Africa by PhD and Masters’ students. These theses never moved towards publication because no-one was interested in publishing African poetry. We’ve started to look at some of these theses and they are brilliant, innovative stuff, work on indigenous voices and how they engage with the contemporary space, work on gender, performatives, and so on. We don’t have to be forcing a new creation of material, there is stuff that is there.
You know there is something violent about the silencing of Black voices through the structures of publishing and that to me is something that people don’t really understand. People think ok, they are just not writing the work, i nah true. These people have PhD’s of their work. Many of them finished their Master’s and went on to do other things. Not even the journals would take it and this is good work… really important work and work that is close to the ground. They did field studies, recordings, from the 50s and the 60s, up till now, so even if all we do is start cataloguing it and summarising it for researchers to be able to access it, then we’re good.
KG: In terms of the poets that you’ve published, are there any of them who’ve come from that first stage, from the Brunel to Sillerman to Glenna Luschei Prize?
KD: The Brunel structure is that it identifies a longlist. That longlist becomes useful for us for the chapbook series, so we use that longlist because what we do with the chapbooks series is that every year we put together lists through recommendations. We send off requests all over Africa and then we take even the Brunel shortlist and we put it into a pool and identify 60–70 poets who we write to and say, ‘you have two weeks to send us a chapbook.’ Then from that pool, we identify for the Sillerman prize. We tell the judges, there are two things to look for, one, the winner, two, anybody you see whose work might not be quite ready, but there’s a chapbook in there somewhere. We tag it, we take that and we then approach them for a chapbook. From that 60, we end up with 13 or 14; so we publish from a wide reach. A lot of the people we publish in chapbooks many of them came out of the Brunel Prize, similarly, the Sillerman winners tend to be people who have already entered the Brunel, so there is a symbiotic kind of relationship between all of these things that date it, so we didn’t want to make it a funnel because someone maybe out of that funnel, and we still want to be able to consider their work.
KG: In terms of the work, what have you, the team noticed regionally, with the writers that you publish? Have there been similarities you’ve noticed whether it be style or themes?
KD: There’s a recent, article of a study of contemporary African poetry emerging looking at these younger poets, and they made a proposition that said well, is this work, really African or how is it influenced by the West, so there are these kinds of questions and I welcome them.
11 Chibueze Darlington Anuonye, ‘Facebook Writers: The Emergence of a New Generation of Nigerian Poets’ Research in African Literature, May 2024. Anuonye uses Harry Garuba’s ‘strategic intervention’ as a theoretic framework to classify a fourth generation of Nigerian poets. But this is a question that of course we’ve been looking at that and very interested in it but one of the key things that Chris [Abani] and I talk about is, we’re not going to dictate what people write about, we are going to try and let the writing tell us where African poetry is, where Nigerian poetry is. We knew that what would happen is poets are like everybody else, they want to be published, they want to know what is being published and whether they can get on it somehow, that’s human and we don’t have a problem with that. But poets are also people who have to understand writing is about where their soul is, where their heart is, what is their passion, and what is driving them, what resonates with them. They are human, they are responding to things. Africa is not a static place, influences from inside and outside continue and the work is going to reflect that, but what I’m seeing is in many of these poets, they have confidence now that they have a home where they can get published, they are no longer imitative, they are now wrestling with what does it mean to be a Muslim poet in Minna, northern Nigeria who also has a Hausa background that goes back to a long literary tradition, poetic tradition, and then there is a strong Islamic influence, how do I know my family, my voice, my ancestry in that space? I’m seeing poets wrestling with that to create fresh, challenging, complex work, work that they would not have risked if they did not have an assurance that somebody was listening, that there is a space for it, so I am completely at ease with poets who are imitative. If it is just slavish imitation, it’s going to be bad poetry.
So, we are asking ourselves, what is fresh and interesting; what is new and what is dynamic and how are they talking to each other, so several things are happening. There are poets saying, ‘let me look out the window, let me see what my world is doing,’ and they are writing in that space, that is what I think poets should be. Poets are listening to each other now they have access, so a poet in Ghana can read Clifton Chicagua in Kenya and say, ‘wow, I love that style, let me see how I can…’, and they are reading each other. How do we know this? They are crediting, they are writing epigraphs; it’s wonderful!
So, I’m not worried because I think the poets are being free to be true. The women are blowing up this space because now they are saying, what is woman’s body in Africa today in that poetics? How do I write that body, how do I deal with my language, my languages and I’m writing in English but how do I deal with my languages? The work is reflecting all of that kind of thing. I want the critics, the scholars to start asking what has emerged? Our job is to take what is in there and say, ‘here it is.’
KG: Where are you not getting poetry from?
KD: Not enough from East Africa. I think people have to understand how populations spread. People say there are so many Nigerian poets and so I say, ‘do you know the population of Nigeria relative to the rest of Africa?’ If that wasn’t happening, then there would be a problem.
So, there is a lot of Nigerian work; we get a lot of South African work, but not a lot because South Africa has a fairly robust publishing mechanism and, for years, it was very Afrikaans but they are publishing more Black African writers now, so I don’t think the imbalance is that crazy. Part of it is language; Somalia has one of the greatest poetic traditions in the world but it’s in Somali and so we are now working with the Library of Congress to translate a lot of Somali work. We have started to identify, and we are getting some like Warsan [Shire] who are Somali writing in English who are dominating, but I’m satisfied where we are getting work from. Smaller countries where things are difficult, like the Congo, we’re trying to generate more work; places like Rwanda, Botswana, these are smaller markets and smaller spaces where we are not getting as much work from as we would hope, but I think all of it still makes sense because where the tradition is longer, in West Africa, it’s likely that those mechanisms would work. Where it’s French [for example] it has to be translated so we are not going to get that, we’re reflective of the English-speaking world.
KG: One of the aspects I think which is still a struggle, which may be less in places like South Africa, is the editorial factor of working with new writers. For example, if they are not getting to send you their work, or even if they are and you say, oh this is interesting but the work is still not there, how can poets be assisted on the continent where they have obviously got this love of poetry whether it is in English or whether it is in a mixture of languages, how do we get the editors in there?
KD: The way we’ve encouraged it is that our writers who we publish are mentoring. For a long time, we were not getting anything out of Liberia for instance and Patricia Jabbah Wesley then asked to do an anthology of Liberian poetry, and asked if we would publish it. She went to Liberia, and she started writing workshops and she’s been back and forth with these young writers. Now we are getting a lot of really strong work out of Liberia, really boots on the ground. We can’t do it, but when our writers are saying we are going to do it, they now have a message which says, if you get your work to a point, there is somewhere we can send it and there are different stages of that development. That’s one of the things that is important, so whenever I go anywhere in Africa, I always have a gathering of poets, whether it’s Ghana, Kenya, or so on, I ask, ‘What are the challenges, what are the needs, how can we help your publishing world?’ This is the way of the APBF and whenever we have been able to do that, that has made a difference because we trust that poets and their ambition will drive this process.