2020 National Poetry Series Winner W.J. Herbert

Kwame Dawes is the author of 21 books of poetry and has written or edited numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent books include the poetry collections City of Bones: A Testament and Punto de Burro, and the novel Bivouac. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund, editor of the award-winning African Poetry Book Series, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, Dawes relocated to the U.S. in 1992, eventually settling in Lincoln, Nebraska. In Nebraska: Poems (University of Nebraska Press), Dawes explores a constant them of his work – the intersection of memory, home, and artistic invention. The poems here are set against the backdrop of Nebraska’s cycle of seasons, and they are meditative even as they search for a sense of place in a new landscape. He grapples with life as a transplant with a strong sense of place and haunting memories. Luke Hollis, in Harvard Review Online, noted that “Dawes is no longer a stranger to the middle American landscape, now a welcome newcomer creating space for new voices to be heard.”

W.J. Herbert’s work was selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. In her debut collection Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press), a five-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, Herbert examines the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, while asking: “Do we as a species deserve to survive?” Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In “Speak to Me,” she puzzles over a millipede, as if its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker’s concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions, the collection’s final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet’s last habitable places. Juxtaposing a profound sense of intimacy with the vastness of geological time, the collection offers a climate-conscious critique of the human species – our search for meaning and intimacy, our capacity for greed and destruction. This is an extended love letter and a dire warning, not only to the daughter its speaker leaves behind, but to all of us.