UMBRIA, ITALY – Jamaican poet Yashika Graham has been awarded a 2025 Writing Fellowship by the distinguished Civitella Ranieri Basis. She joins an elite worldwide cohort of 25 fellows chosen from over 130 international candidates. These candidates come from the fields of literature, music, and visible artwork. The extremely aggressive residency program is hosted in a Fifteenth-century citadel in Umbria, Italy. It gives Graham with six weeks of uninterrupted inventive time and cross-disciplinary change.
In receiving this award, Graham joins a distinguished lineage of Jamaican and Caribbean literary voices at Civitella. This group contains Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite (1996), Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid (2002), and Jamaicans Ishion Hutchinson (2023), and Safiya Sinclair (2023).
This continuation of Caribbean excellence at Civitella displays the area’s dynamic and rising affect in international literature.
Debut Poetry Assortment: A few of Us Can Go Again House
This honor arrives on the heels of Graham’s debut poetry assortment, Some of Us Can Go Back Home. It was shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry, the area’s most prestigious literary award.
The gathering has been praised for its lyrical power, emotional depth, and unwavering consideration to put. It notably focuses on its evocative engagement with rural Jamaican life.
Famend Trinidadian author and critic Shivanee Ramlochan describes Graham’s debut as “…each annunciation and reckoning, each household tree and combating chant…” She finds Graham’s photographs “…so highly effective they each shatter and reassemble the center.”
In A few of Us Can Go Again House, Graham crafts poetry that’s as intimate as it’s expansive. It weaves private and collective reminiscence right into a vivid tapestry of sound, loss, survival, and the agricultural life she hails from. Her audio system traverse the lesser-seen edges of Jamaican existence—backroads, bush, market cities, the kitchen, and the lifeless yard. That is executed with a reverence that restores visibility to missed geographies and communities.
In line with the Civitella Ranieri Basis, the fellowship gives “a personal area for dwelling and dealing within the firm of different Fellows. It continues a convention of hospitality and inventive change inside a historic setting.”
At the moment in Italy, this chance marks a important level in Graham’s improvement as a author. Her work champions the vernacular, the maternal, and the land as very important poetic sources. It gives her area to develop on the intergenerational inquiries of A few of Us Can Go Again House. These inquiries discover belonging and dislocation. They study what it means to hold narratives of grief, rural data, and ancestral reckoning into a contemporary world.
Literary Voice from the Caribbean
This fellowship additionally affirms Graham’s rising function as a literary voice from the Caribbean. Her work stays deeply embedded within the soils of her house, and its attain now extends globally.
