Kwame Senu Neville Dawes (born 28 July 1962) is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician,[1] and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina.

He is currently a Chancellor's Professor of English and Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a faculty member of Cave Canem Foundation, and a teacher in the Pacific MFA program in Oregon.

Dawes collaborated with San Francisco–based writer and composer Kevin Simmonds on Wisteria: Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country, which debuted at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2006, and featured sopranos Valetta Brinson and Valerie Johnson.

In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy Award in the category of New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Arts, Lifestyle & Culture.

[21] In 2016, the event Respect Due: Symposium on the Work of Kwame Dawes featured participants including Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Shara McCallum, Vladimir Lucien, Ishion Hutchinson, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Robert Lee, and Lorna Goodison.

[24] In 2019 he was one of the eight recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prize, alongside Ishion Hutchinson (Jamaica), Danielle McLaughlin (Ireland), David Chariandy (Canada), Raghu Karnad (India), Rebecca Solnit (US), Young Jean Lee (US) and Patricia Cornelius (Australia).

[8][27] Dawes established the South Carolina Poetry Initiative's annual book prize competition, and edits the winning manuscripts.