Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. In addition to her 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, Ama has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. She is the Guggenheim Museum’s 2023 Poet-in-Residence and the winner of a 2023 Whiting Writer's Award.

The Value of Support

"There have been many meaningful beginnings to my life as a writer, but one of the most significant was receiving the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. It provided me with financial support, public recognition, and an affirmation of my identity as an artist. It was a true gift that came just at the right time. I am honored to have joined a collective of past recipients whose work I admire and deeply respect. I am encouraged to write poems that can exist in conversation with the work of these women and in the larger field of poetry we are each a part of."