Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/dawes-pulitzer-center-take-on-hiv-aids-in-jamaica Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Poet Kwame Dawes teamed up with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to create a multimedia Web site called "HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica." The interactive site pairs his poetry with music, essays and video from people living with the disease and their caretakers. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, an unusual tale of AIDS, journalism, and poetry. Jeffrey Brown has the story. KWAME DAWES, poet: So many scenes frighten me, and I grow silent. Disease has a name, HIV/AIDS. JEFFREY BROWN: In 2007, poet Kwame Dawes returned to Jamaica, the country he'd grown up in, for an unusual reporting and writing project. Dawes has written numerous books of verse and taught at the University of South Carolina since 1992. Now he was assigned to document the lives of victims of HIV/AIDS.The project he says challenged and then compelled him to seek different ways to tell the story through prose and ultimately poetry. KWAME DAWES: The story took me. In other words, I was taken by the story as I started to do it. And where I am now with the story is quite different from where I started with the story. JEFFREY BROWN: The AIDS assignment came from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a nonprofit media organization based in Washington that promotes in-depth coverage of international affairs.Jon Sawyer, the center's founder, wanted to commission a story on Jamaica's AIDS problem, but one that would see and address it through an unconventional lens.