Discipline: Literature – poetry

Ama Codjoe

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: Brooklyn, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2018, 2023

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist both for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Codjoe has been awarded support from Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Hawthornden, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Among other honors, Codjoe has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and an Amy Clampitt Residency. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

While at MacDowell in 2018, Codjoe completed poems towards her first collection, and during her 2023 Fellowship, she wrote poems toward her third full-length collection.

Made at MacDowell

Fellow Works Supported by MacDowell

Bluest Nude (Poetry Collection)

Studios

Heyward

Ama Codjoe worked in the Heyward studio.

The Lodge Annex, a wing on the west side of the men’s dormitory (The Lodge), was completed in 1926. Initially intended as an apartment for a caretaker, the space was soon repurposed as a live-in studio for writers. In recognition of a major endowment gift from the DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Foundation, Lodge Annex was…

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