Poet Laureate Kwame Dawes addresses Senate as chamber pays tribute to Harding, Francis and others

KINGSTON — Jamaica’s Poet Laureate, Professor Kwame Dawes, was welcomed to the Senate on Friday, July 17, 2026, where he spoke on the role of poetry in national life and read from his work and that of his late father, Neville Dawes, before the chamber turned to tributes for several prominent Jamaicans who had died.

Senate President Tom Tavares-Finson suspended the sitting for the special welcome, noting Dawes is Jamaica’s fourth Poet Laureate since Independence, succeeding Mervyn Morris, Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior. Dawes was invested in January 2025 for a three-year term. He holds the Musgrave Silver Medal (2004) and the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander (2022), teaches literary arts at Brown University, and serves as artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival.

Dawes said poets chronicle the sentiment of their times and that preserving Jamaican literary voices resists erasure rooted in the island’s history of enslavement. He described a series honouring major Jamaican poets at the Philip Sherlock Centre, including Claude McKay and Una Marson, with Louise Bennett and Neville Dawes to follow. He read poems including Neville Dawes’s “Acceptance,” “Thelma’s Precious Cargo,” work from an Ethiopia assignment for the BBC, “Replenishment” — a prayer for Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa — and “In This Saying,” dedicated to his wife, Lorna.

The Minister of Education thanked Dawes and pledged closer collaboration so children encounter literature that affirms Jamaican identity. Senators also praised Calabash and the tradition of receiving poet laureates in the chamber.

The Senate then recorded tributes. Members noted the morning’s death of West Indies cricket great Sir Garfield Sobers and paid extensive homage to Professor the Honourable Oswald Harding, OJ, CD, KC — former Senate president, justice minister and attorney-general, and Jamaica’s longest-serving senator — with condolences to his wife Marigold and sons Jeremy and Zachary.

Tributes followed for athletic coach Vincent Stephen Francis, OJ, co-founder of MVP Track and Field Club and mentor to stars including Asafa Powell and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce; former Manchester North Western MP Dean Alexander Peart; and former St. James West Central MP Arthur Eastern Nelson, OD.

The House message on the Mediation Act, 2026, was received for first reading before the Senate adjourned to a date to be fixed.