UMBRIA, ITALY – Jamaican poet Yashika Graham has been awarded a 2025 Writing Fellowship by the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She joins an elite international cohort of 25 fellows selected from over 130 global applicants. These applicants come from the fields of literature, music, and visual art. The highly competitive residency program is hosted in a 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy. It provides Graham with six weeks of uninterrupted creative time and cross-disciplinary exchange.
In receiving this award, Graham joins a distinguished lineage of Jamaican and Caribbean literary voices at Civitella. This group includes Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite (1996), Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid (2002), and Jamaicans Ishion Hutchinson (2023), and Safiya Sinclair (2023).
This continuation of Caribbean excellence at Civitella reflects the region’s dynamic and growing influence in global literature.
Debut Poetry Collection: Some of Us Can Go Back Home
This honor arrives on the heels of Graham’s debut poetry collection, Some of Us Can Go Back Home. It was shortlisted for the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry, the region’s most prestigious literary award.
The collection has been praised for its lyrical strength, emotional depth, and unwavering attention to place. It particularly focuses on its evocative engagement with rural Jamaican life.
Renowned Trinidadian writer and critic Shivanee Ramlochan describes Graham’s debut as “…both annunciation and reckoning, both family tree and fighting chant…” She finds Graham’s images “…so powerful they both shatter and reassemble the heart.”
In Some of Us Can Go Back Home, Graham crafts poetry that is as intimate as it is expansive. It weaves personal and collective memory into a vivid tapestry of sound, loss, survival, and the rural life she hails from. Her speakers traverse the lesser-seen edges of Jamaican existence—backroads, bush, market towns, the kitchen, and the dead yard. This is done with a reverence that restores visibility to overlooked geographies and communities.
According to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the fellowship provides “a private space for living and working in the company of other Fellows. It continues a tradition of hospitality and creative exchange within a historic setting.”
Currently in Italy, this opportunity marks a critical point in Graham’s development as a writer. Her work champions the vernacular, the maternal, and the land as vital poetic sources. It offers her space to expand on the intergenerational inquiries of Some of Us Can Go Back Home. These inquiries explore belonging and dislocation. They examine what it means to carry narratives of grief, rural knowledge, and ancestral reckoning into a modern world.
Literary Voice from the Caribbean
This fellowship also affirms Graham’s growing role as a literary voice from the Caribbean. Her work remains deeply embedded in the soils of her home, and its reach now extends globally.
