Jamaican poet Yashika Graham awarded prestigious 2025 Civitella Ranieri Writing Fellowship

Jamaican poet Yashika Graham has been awarded a 2025 Writing Fellowship by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, a highly competitive residency program hosted in a 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy. The fellowship provides selected artists six weeks of dedicated creative time alongside opportunities for cross-disciplinary exchange.

Graham is one of 25 fellows chosen from more than 130 international applicants in literature, music, and visual art. She joins a distinguished lineage of Jamaican and Caribbean literary voices who have participated in the fellowship, including Kamau Brathwaite, Jamaica Kincaid, Ishion Hutchinson, and Safiya Sinclair.

The fellowship comes on the heels of Graham’s debut poetry collection, Some of Us Can Go Back Home, which was recently shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry. The collection has been praised for its lyrical strength, emotional depth, and focus on rural Jamaican life.

In her work, Graham “weaves personal and collective memory into a vivid tapestry of sound, loss, survival, and the rural life she hails from,” exploring “the lesser-seen edges of Jamaican existence” while championing “the vernacular, the maternal, and the land as vital poetic sources.”

The Civitella Ranieri Fellowship will allow Graham to continue developing her craft in an inspiring international environment, further cementing her place among the Caribbean’s most promising literary voices.