Kwame Dawes—Emmy-winning poet, founding editor of African Poetry Book Fund (APBF), and editor of Prairie Schooner—is developing a digital portal for African poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he is also a Chancellor’s Professor of English, reports The Daily Nebraskan. “The African Digital Portal,” to be launched in 2019, “will feature artifacts, newspapers and manuscripts related to African poetry, dating from the 19th century to the modern era.”
Dawes’ project will be funded with a $150,000 grant from Ford Foundation, a group he says “helps to promote initiatives taken by the African Poetry Book Fund to support African arts” and “has been supportive in recognizing the importance of [digitizing] African Poetry.”
“The portal will provide a single place where one can learn a great deal about African poetry,” Dawes stated. “The APBF is committed to creating an open-access platform which will allow scholars, poets and lovers of poetry to freely access the data that will be available on the portal.”
The project, which has just begun, “includes listing poetry materials from African authors around the globe and organizing materials on specific regions of Africa,” states Prairie Schooner and APBF Managing Editor Ashley Strosnider. “People will be able to click on African regional maps where they will be linked to poetry based on a specific region.”
While Strosnider acknowledges that “some African poetry literature and publications may not be accessible because of lack of language translation and location tracking,” she hopes that “the online database will provide centralized access to people who are interested in learning more about African poetry.”
Kwame Dawes, who became the first African winner of Barnes & Noble’s Writers for Writers Award for his work in supporting other writers, was recently named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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