It is with great sadness that we learn of the passing of award-winning Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite. Read more at Barbados Today.
Kamau Brathwaite was internationally celebrated Barbadian poet, performer, and cultural theorist. Cofounder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, he attended Pembroke College, Cambridge and earned his PhD from the University of Sussex. Brathwaite served on the board of directors of UNESCO’s History of Mankind project and as cultural advisor to the government of Barbados from 1975–1979, resuming this position in 1990.
His honors include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the Charity Randall Prize for Performance and Written Poetry. He has received Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, among many others. His book The Zea Mexican Diary (1993) was the Village Voice Book of the Year. His many works include Middle Passages (1994), Ancestors (2001), and The Development of Creole Society, 1770–1820 (2005). He worked in the Ministry of Education in Ghana and taught at the University of the West Indies, Southern Illinois University, the University of Nairobi, Boston University, Holy Cross College, Yale University, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
After retiring from his position of professor of comparative literature at New York University, Brathwaite returned to his home in CowPastor, Barbados. His most recent book is The Lazarus Poems (October 2017). Other books include Elegguas (2010) and Born to Slow Horses (2005) which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006. Brathwaite was also the sole 2006 Musgrave Gold Medalist, an honor bestowed by the Institute of Jamaica. In 2015, he received the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from Poetry Society of America.
from Lazarus Poems
Set in Brathwaite’s signature Sycorax video style
