Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe is an educator, writer, and dance artist with roots in Memphis, Tennessee, and Accra, Ghana. She is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a 2023 Whiting Award, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for outstanding poetry; and the chapbook Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Codjoe’s poems have been published in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Best American Poetry, and other outlets. Codjoe has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship, a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, Georgia Review’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, an Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, a DISQUIET Literary Prize, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and an Amy Clampitt Residency, among other honors. Codjoe has received support from Cave Canem and the Robert Rauschenberg and Saltonstall Foundations as well as from Callaloo, Hawthornden, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and MacDowell.

Codjoe is the 2023 poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She lives in New York.