"I have found peacefulness somewhere at last"

“Poet and educator Ama Codjoe has been selected as the Guggenheim’s 2023 Poet-in-Residence, and she is in the midst of planning programming slated to begin this spring. Codjoe intends to use her residency to explore sensory poetics, ‘how poetry can also be a primary experience using our other senses: touch, smell, taste,’ she says. Her work will be anchored by Audre Lorde’s words: ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”

Read more about the Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence program, which was launched in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, and Codjoe’s plans for the year ahead here. 

“I kept coming back to [Gwendolyn Brooks’s] poem, ‘To Prisoners,’ where I think, in her mind, she was thinking about the mindset of actual prisoners and trying to get them to think beyond their bars. But I think of it as prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear, prisoners of racism, of education, anything, you know. That we can close our minds and see no way out, that we can be prisoners of so many things.”