Home is Where

In Home is Where, Kwame Dawes compiles the work of more than two dozen African-American poets from the Carolinas, showcasing a vast array of original voices writing on subjects ranging from Jim Crow to jazz, haunted landscapes to romantic love—all in an attempt to define the South as home. Dawes, the nationally celebrated poet, dramatist, scholar, novelist, essayist, and founder of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative, edits this new and unparalleled anthology from Hub City Press.

The poets range in notoriety, from National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes, PEN American Open Book Award winner Nikky Finney and Ansfield-Wolf Award winner A. Van Jordan, to poets perhaps less recognizable by name, but whose poems you will immediately recognize as powerful, musical, and accomplished.

In his introductory essay to the anthology, Dawes proclaims the necessity of this collection, not only for the purposes of getting extraordinary poetry into the hands of readers, but also in terms of the political importance of the voices represented. What is in these pages is nothing less than a significant part of the contemporary poetry scene in America, and also a piece of American history, that in the past has not received its due credit. With Home is Where, that credit is restored.