Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for an NAACP Image Award, 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, and MacDowell. She is a sister in the collective Poets at the End of the World. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, 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.

Q&A with Ama Codjoe, author of The Bluest Nude

Suffering is non-negotiable, and I am grateful for how poem-making helps me live with and through what is painful and cherish what is joyful. With all of this in mind, I aim to craft poems that have blood in them, that give something to the reader.

Love Jones

“They’re about to miss each other / again.”