Ajanaé Dawkins
About the Artist
Words have the power to heal, connect, and express deeper questions and truths. The heights of the art form are captured in the poetry of interdisciplinary writer, theologian, and educator Ajanaé Dawkins, Urban Arts Space’s 2024 Community Artist-in-Residence. The selection committee praised the poet’s breadth of experience in the literary arts as well as her commitment to community involvement and education.
Ajanaé Dawkins holds a bachelors in English from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, an MFA in poetry from Randolph College, and a Masters of Theology from Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She has performed at venues across the country, including opening for Nikki Giovanni and the United Nations Secretary of Sexual Violence in Conflict. She was the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize, a finalist for the Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, and a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins poetry prize. In addition, she was the Taft Museum’s 2022 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence and is a fellow of Torch Literary, The Watering Hole, and Pink Door. She has work published or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, The Offing, and more.
Currently, Ajanaé serves as a co-host of the VS Podcast with the Poetry Foundation and as the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review. She revels in finding new ways to create immersive experiences and teach theory and craft. Throughout her literary career, she has taught seventh-grade English Language Arts, secured grants to teach free workshops to BIPOC, and developed programming centering Black art. You can find her in the middle of the dance floor, at the skate rink, the local winery, library, karaoke night, or in her kitchen cooking something slow.
Ajanaé writes about the lived experiences of Black women to explore the politics of faith, grief, sisterhood, and sensuality. One of her current projects is a poetry chapbook that examines Black mother-daughter relationships in her maternal lineage and pop culture. She plans to develop the project into a one-woman show that highlights the issue of missing Black women through the disappearance and 31-year-old cold case of her great aunt. Ajanaé is also working on an essay series exploring the relationship between Black poetry and the Black Church through the evolution of her own faith and upbringing as a pastor’s daughter.
The Story Continues!
Urban Arts Space is excited to share that Ajanaé's residency has been extended across 2024! Ajanaé will collaborate with fellow Community Artist-in-Residence Arris' Cohen to create additional public programming. We're grateful to Ajanaé and Arris' for all the hard work they've put into their community programming, exhibitions, and artistry, bringing other local artists and community collaborators into the fold.
Culminating Exhibition: No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters
July 11–August 3, 2024, Urban Arts Space
No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters explores the intimate relationships between Black women through the artist’s disrupted matrilineal archive, Black literature, faith, docu-poetics, and Afrofuturist imaginings. It complicates the question, “Where do Black girls go when they go missing?” while considering the epidemic of missing Black girls/women and the metaphysical locations Black women find themselves in between girlhood and womanhood. This exhibition is a celebration of Black cultural and familial inheritance, a place of mourning, and an invitation to search for yourself.
View the Online Exhibition Archive!
As part of this project, Ajanaé invited six other local Black artists to participate in their own exhibitions, including a solo show from Iyana Hill and a group show in the upper gallery. View the online exhibitions for the shows below!
I didn't ask for my conception — Iyana Hill Solo Show
Thank God for blood-memory — Group Exhibition Archive
Community Projects & Events
February 29, 2024
Ajanaé Dawkins began her artist residency with Urban Arts Space at Portlock Manor, a community gathering space centering women of color. This launch party was both a celebration and resource for artists and curators in the city. Ajanaé performed her work alongside Tyiesha Radford Shorts. Artists received free head shots, connected with other creatives, and took home some specially curated resources and books.
March 29–April 5, 2024
For March’s Artist Commune: Portable Paradise, Urban Arts Space asked artists to radically explore the idea of paradise in a pop-up exhibition curated by Ajanaé Dawkins. Questions that shaped this theme: Who are the architects of Paradise? Who is on the margins in dominant ideas of Paradise? Who is invited? Who gets the authority to name what Paradise is like? How do you get there? Shaped but not limited by these questions, we asked artists to create work that engages the metaphysical, tangible, and personal to re-imagine Paradise.
This exhibition showcased a diverse range of interpretations of Paradise through various artistic mediums, creating a space that challenged the way our unique identities and socioeconomic positions shape our concept of Paradise.
April 5, 2024
“And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.”
— Roger Robinson, “A Portable Paradise”
This evening event at Urban Arts Space featured readings by high school and college students, along with their instructors, from Columbus Academy High School, Bexley High School, Otterbein University, Denison University, and The Ohio State University. These students and staff members participated in writing workshops with Columbus-based poet-educator Peter Kahn and acclaimed Black-British writer Roger Robinson, winner of the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize.
Audience members heard work from burgeoning student writers who shared the stage with local poets Cynthia Amoah and Ajanaé Dawkins, along with Roger Robinson as the headliner and music provided by DJ O Sharp.
July 26, 2024
Documentary poetry—or docu-poetics—is poetry that uses various forms of research and archive. In this workshop, participants were asked to bring something from an archive that was important to them (e.g., historical document, news article, photograph, interview, physical object). This workshop encouraged participants to see their poetry as a contribution to the archive.
October–November 2024
This virtual four-week docu-poetics workshop, led by Columbus-based poet Ajanaé Dawkins, invited participants to generate new work by engaging with various forms of research and archival practice. They considered the work of Courtney Faye Taylor, Victoria Chang, Claudia Rankine, Krista Franklin, and more. This workshop was for participants who have a research interest (personal or otherwise) that they were interested in exploring through poetry.
This youth arts workshop at the Ohio State Community Extension Center gave teens a creative opportunity to work with current artists-in-residence at Urban Arts Space, Arris' Cohen and Ajanaé Dawkins. Through guided activities, students created individual art pieces and poems, then collaborated with each other in the spirit of Arris' and Ajanaé's collaboration.
