Ama Codjoe Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, 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, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series.
In addition to her 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, Ama has received fellowships from 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. She is also the Guggenheim Museum's 2023 Poet-in-Residence.
To date eleven Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards winners have gone on to receive Whiting Writers’ Awards: Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Elif Batuman, Ama Codjoe, Trudy Dittmar, Amy Leach, Dana Levin, ZZ Packer, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Tracy K. Smith, LB Thompson, and Merritt Tierce.