The African Poetry Digital Portal, an initiative led by Kwame Dawes and Lorna Dawes, has received a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As reported by Brown University News, the three-year initiative will collect and contextualize African poetic works, biographies, critical scholarship, and media coverage into a single, publicly accessible online resource.

Kwame and Lorna Dawes recently moved to Brown University after more than a decade at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In their move to Brown, they are bringing with them the poetry portal first established in 2018 with a $150,000 Ford Foundation grant, as well as the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF), a publishing platform for African poetry founded in 2012. (Though now based at Brown, the APBF will continue its publishing partnerships with the University of Nebraska Press and Akashic Books.)

The new Mellon grant will significantly expand the poetry portal, transforming it into a one-stop digital resource for poetry, biographies, scholarship, and news coverage from across Africa and the global African diaspora.

“I believe poets are the chroniclers of the sentiment of their time,” Kwame Dawes said. “If you didn’t know anything about Uganda, but then you read some poems from Uganda, it would unlock your empathy and imagination. You’d immediately understand something about the way people there exist and feel. If we make more spaces for African poets, we can understand more about human existence.”

The project will employ postdoctoral researchers and scholars to develop databases, bibliographies, and digital humanities projects that illuminate the life and work of African poets such as Dennis Brutus, Safia Elhillo, and Christopher Okigbo. It will also focus on recovering and unifying scattered poetry records—many of which exist across multiple continents and formats—into a comprehensive digital archive.

Lorna Dawes describes the project as “a digital reunification,” bringing together dispersed materials from oral recordings housed in Togo to manuscripts in France to translations in U.S. libraries. “We’re bringing those dispersed pieces together digitally so scholars can go and find everything,” she said.

The African Poetry Digital Portal is being developed in collaboration with Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship. A full launch timeline has yet to be announced, but the project marks a major step toward building the kind of robust, open-access infrastructure long missing from the study of African literature.

Congrats to Kwame Dawes and Lorna Dawes!