Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; 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, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden Literary Retreat, Willipa Bay AiR, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and a recipient of a 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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."