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Ghanaian born, Jamaican-raised poet Kwame Dawes is joined by Jamaican-born and raised rising poet Safiya Sinclair. The two poets will, through their work, honor reggae music and its biggest star, Robert Nestor Marley, the day before the late star’s 73rd birthday.  Kwame Dawes is the author of 16 collections of poetry, including, most recently Duppy Conqueror and two novels, Bivouac and She’s Gone, winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best First Novel. Dawes  is an actor, playwright, and producer, fifteen of his plays have been produced, and he has acted in, directed, or produced several of these productions himself, most recently One Love at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Dawes also founded and was executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry. Sinclair is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the Amy Clampitt Residency Award.