Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. From 2009 to 2012, she was Toronto’s poet laureate. A poet engagé, Brand’s award-winning poetry books include Land to Light On, thirsty, Inventory,
and Ossuaries. Her latest, The Blue Clerk, an essay poem, won the Trillium Book Award. Theory, her latest of five novels, won the Toronto Book Award. She is the author of the influential non-fiction work, A Map to the Door of No Return. Her most recent non-fiction work is An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. Brand is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Erna Brodber born to a small farmer and an elementary school teacher in 1940 in rural Jamaica. Graduated from the University College of the West Indies-London/ University of the West Indies with BA (hons) in History, MSc in Sociology, PhD in History. Lectured for many years at the Dept of Sociology UWI (Mona), Research fellow/ Distinguished research fellow at the Institute of Social and Economic Research/ Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Research (UWI- Mona) also for many years. Author of six published works of fiction and seven of non-fiction plus several papers in peer-reviewed journals. Attracted several fellowships in Europe and the USA, winner Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, given a Golden Musgrave Award (Institute of Jamaica), made a Prince Klaus laureate (the Government of the Netherlands), given an Order of Distinction (commander class) from the government of Jamaica, made a doctor of letters by the University Of the West Indies and received a Windham-Campbell award (Yale University). Currently working "Searching for Great Grand Mother: another history of Jamaica 1721-1952."
Born and raised in Puerto Rico (1946) Magali García Ramis is considered part of the “70’s Generation” of writers whose literature impacted the island culturally, socially and politically.
García Ramis studied History at the University of Puerto Rico and a Master of Science in Journalism at Columbia University, New York. She worked as a journalist in several venues, and as professor of Journalism and Communications at the University of Puerto Rico. She has published novels, short stories, essays and articles. Her best-known works are the novel Felices días, Tío Sergio, and the book of essays and columns La ciudad que me habita. Currently she’s working on a memoir, El libro de las tías. Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press 2015). Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) is an exploration of black methodologies. She is currently working on two projects: the first, unnamed, attends to how theories of ecology and extraction emerge in black diaspora studies; the second, Pastel Blue, studies colour, colour theory, image-making, and black aesthetics.
Christine Craig, was born in Kingston, Jamaica and spent much of her early years in rural St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, at the home of her grandparents. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Mona with a B.A. (Hons) in English and Mass Communications.
She has written several non fiction publications and training manuals on feminist and health issues. Her short stories and poems have been published in Caribbean, British and American anthologies and journals. In 1989 she was awarded a Fellowship to the International Writers’ Program at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. Her first publications, Emanuel and His Parrot, and Emanuel Goes to Market, both published by Oxford University Press, were a collaboration with her then husband, Jamaican artist Karl ‘Jerry’ Craig. These were the first full colour children’s books to feature a Jamaican child. She wrote and presented a series of Jamaican history vignettes for children’s television, and in 1990, Heinemann Caribbean published Bird Gang, a novella for children. Her first poetry collection was Quadrille for Tigers, Mina Press, Berkeley CA. In 2010, her second poetry anthology All Things Bright was published by Peepal Tree Pres, Leeds, UK and included a reprint of Quadrille for Tigers. Craig has been a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights. She was instrumental in setting up the Women’s Bureau in the 1980's, for governmental and non-governmental protection of women’s rights in Jamaica. With Denis Watson, she co-authored Guyana at the Crossroads, University of Miami,1992. Also in 1992, she co-edited Jamaica’s National Report to the World Conference on the Environment, Rio de Janeiro. From 1990 to 1998, she was Miami Editor of The Jamaica Gleaner in Miami, Florida, responsible for news, features and publicity. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Anthea Morrison is a retired Senior Lecturer in Comparative Caribbean Literature, Department of Literatures in English, UWI Mona. Prior to joining the staff at Mona, she lectured in francophone literature at the Cave Hill Campus of The UWI from 1986-2004, and previously worked as a translator. She was Deputy Dean for Graduate Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Education, UWI Mona (2016-2018), and Deputy Dean for Undergraduate Studies (2013-2015). Her research interests include Caribbean poetry, migrant literature and Caribbean/African American women’s writing. She has published articles on post-Négritude francophone Caribbean poetry, Caribbean/African American women’s writing and Caribbean diasporic literature; and co-edited, with Judith Byfield and LaRay Denzer, Gendering the African Diaspora. Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and the Nigerian Hinterland. She is the author of New Crossings: Caribbean Migration Narratives (UWI Press, 2019), and is currently working on a monograph on the poetry of Lorna Goodison.
Elizabeth (Betty) Wilson, a former head of the Department of French at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica, is retired from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, UWI, where she taught French Language and Literature and Translation. She was adjunct in the Department of Literatures in English for five years, in charge of the graduate course “Women, Gender and Fiction”. She has translated poetry and prose, from French and Spanish, including the novels Juletane, by Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Heinemann, 1987), Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia/Exile according to Julia (CARAF, University of Virginia Press, 2003) and the first collection in English by Yanick Lahens, (Haiti), Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories, (CARAF, 2010). With her sister, the writer Pam Mordecai, she edited the first anthology of Writing by Caribbean Women, Her True True Name (Heinemann, 1989). For many years Betty was a member of the French Examining Committee of the Caribbean Examination Council, including being Chief Examiner for French at both the secondary and advanced levels. She lives in Jamaica.
Find information about Elizabeth Wilson (Betty)’s publications here
Velma Pollard is a retired Senior Lecturer in Language Education in the Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Arts and Education of the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. Her major research interests have been Creole Languages of the Anglophone Caribbean, The Language of Caribbean Literature and Caribbean Women’s Writing. Articles in these areas appear in local and international journals. She has published a handbook: From Jamaican Creole to Standard English-a handbook for teachers (1994,2003) and a monograph: Dread Talk-the language of Rastafari (1994, 2000). Pollard has published poems and stories in regional and international journals and anthologies. Her publications include a novel, three collections of short fiction and five books of poetry. Her novella Karl won the Casa de las Americas prize in 1992.
Olive Senior is the prizewinning author of 18 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature. Her many awards include Canada’s Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Her work has been taught internationally and widely translated, most recently her poetry books Gardening in the Tropics into Arabic and Shell into Spanish. Her book of Pandemic Poems which she has been sharing on social media during ‘the summer of Covid-19’ will be published shortly.
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Mary Ann Gosser-Esquilín is the University Honors Director and a Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Florida Atlantic University. She completed her A.B. degree in French at Bryn Mawr College, PA; her license and maîtrise in Comparative Literature at the Université de Provence I, Aix-en-Provence; and her doctorate in Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her areas of interest encompass the literatures of the French- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. She has taught at Rutgers University; at Denis Diderot, Université de Paris VII; and at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, as a visiting Fulbright Scholar. http://www.fau.edu/artsandletters/llcl/faculty/faculty-profiles/gosser/
Merle Hodge (B.A. and M.Phil. University of London, Ph.D., University of the West Indies), was born in 1944, in Calcutta Settlement, Trinidad and Tobago. She was educated up to secondary level in Trinidad and Tobago, and then at the University of London. She has taught at secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago; was involved in teacher education in the Grenada Revolution; lectured at The University of the West Indies (Mona and St Augustine campuses), at The University of the Virgin Islands, and in the US (at the colleges Wellesley and Dartmouth). Among her areas of interest are Caribbean language, family, literature. She is a cultural and social activist (co-founder of Women Working for Social Progress); and a writer. She has published two novels: Crick Crack, Monkey and For the Life of Laetitia; short stories; academic papers; articles in Caribbean and international journals; and a textbook, The Knots in English: A Manual for Caribbean Users. Her forthcoming novel is titled One Day, One Day, Congotay.
Carmen Lugo Filippi, nacida en Ponce, Puerto Rico en 1940, es ahora profesora jubilada de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Ha colaborado en varias publicaciones puertorriqueñas, de que se da una selección aquí. Junto a Ana Lydia Vega es coautora del cuento colección Vírgenes y Mártires (1981). Con otros escritores literarios de la Generación del Setenta, publicó un libro de ensayos, El Tramo Ancla. Con Ana Lydia Vega y Roberto Villanúa, también es coautora de un texto universitario, Le Nouveau Français Vécu y autora del estudio Los cuentistas y el cuento: encuesta entre los cultivadores del género. Publicó ademas la novela Narronamiando con Mirta (1999), elogiado por los lectores y la critica. En francés, ella publicó el ensayo "" L'emploi de la deuxième personne dans La mort d’Artemio Cruz de Carlos Fuentes et La modificación de Michel Butor: niveaux du narrateur intermédiaire “, un comparativo estudio de las dos novelas.
Pamela Mordecai lives in Toronto, where she writes poetry and prose for children and adults and teaches at the Humber School for Writers. Her debut novel, RED JACKET, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Award, one of Canada's top fiction prizes, and her short story collection, PINK ICING, was recently released as an audiobook, read by herself. Her seventh collection of poetry, A FIERCE GREEN PLACE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, is forthcoming from New Directions. Her poetry is archived at mordecai.citl.mun.ca and the Digital Libraries of the Caribbean (dLoc)
Grace Nichols was born in Guyana but has lived in Britain since 1977. She has won several awards for her poetry including the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first collection, I is a long-memoried Woman, the Guyana Poetry Prize for Sunris and the Cholmondeley Award in 2001. Among her other collections are ‘The Fat Black Woman’s’Poems (Virago) ‘Startling the Flying Fish’ (Virago) and ’The Insomnia Poems’ (Bloodaxe) She’s also written a number of children’s books. She was poet-in-residence at the Tate Gallery, London, which resulted in her collection, ‘Picasso I Want My Face Back’(Bloodaxe). She is among the poets studied on the General Certificate of Secundary Education (GCSE) syllabus. A new book, Passport to Here and There (2020) was recently published by Bloodaxe Books.
Janice Shinebourne was born Janice Lowe on 23 June 1947. the second child of Charles and Marion Lowe. She grew up on a sugar estate, Rose Hall, in Berbice, where she witnessed at first hand the colonial politics that dominated the lives of sugar estate workers in a rural setting. At the age of 19, she moved to the capital, Georgetown, where she worked briefly as a reporter with the Guyana Graphic newspapers and was a student at the University of Guyana. She did not finish her BA degree there but postponed her studies to get married to John Shinebourne and leave to live in London in 1970. There she completed her BA and started an MA degree . She also completed her first novel, Timepiece, which was published in 1986 by Peepal Tree Press. She became the first woman to win the Guyana Prize in 1987 when Timepiece won the prize for a first novel. She became a political activist in London, involved in anti-racist campaigns and politics during a time when racism was at its peak in the UK. She reviewed books for the antiracist journal, Race Today, and the feminist journal Everywoman. In 1988, Peepal Tree Press published her second novel, The Last English Planation. This was followed by a collection of short stories. The Godmother and other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize. There followed a third novel, Chinese Women, was published in 2010. Her fourth novel, The Last Ship, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2015. She has completed a 5th novel, The Starapple Tree, as yet unpublished.
Vicky Unwin was the Publisher of the Heinemann African and Caribbean Writers Series between 1984 and 1993 and publisher of Her True True Name. She has written two books Love & War in the WRNS (History Press 2015) and The Boy from Boskovice: a father’s secret life (Unbound 2021). She is currently Chair of Wasafiri, on the Caine Prize Council and Trustee of several charities.
Nacida en Santurce, Puerto Rico, en l946, la escritora Ana Lydia Vega cursó estudios subgraduados en la Facultad de Humanidades de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Posteriormente, recibió una beca Fulbright para estudiar en Francia, donde obtuvo los grados de Licenciatura, Maestría y Doctorado en Letras Modernas (Université Paul Valéry, l969 y Université de Provence, l971 y l978, respectivamente) Su tesis doctoral se titula: El mito del rey Christophe de Haití en el teatro antillano y norteamericano (Université de Provence, l978), tesis microfilmada por la Universidad de Laval, Québec. Desde l970 hasta 2001, se desempeñó como profesora de francés y de literatura francófona caribeña en el Departamento de Lenguas Extranjeras de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.
Su narrativa publicada incluye los libros: Vírgenes y mártires (Editorial Antillana, Río Piedras, l98l), Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (Editorial Antillana, l982), Pasión de historia y otras historias de pasión (Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires, l987), Falsas crónicas del sur (Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, l99l) y Celita y el mangle zapatero, (Editorial de la UPR, l998). Ha cultivado extensamente el periodismo de opinión como columnista del semanario Claridad, (l985) del mensuario Diálogo (l989) y del diario El Nuevo Día (l996 hasta el presente). Los cuentos de Vega le han valido distinciones como el Premio Casa de las Américas (La Habana, 1982) y una beca de la Fundación Guggenheim (1989). En 2015, la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Arecibo, le confirió un Doctorado Honoris Causa por su labor en el campo de las letras.
In 1970, Mirta Yáñez graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in Hispanic Languages and Literatures. In 1992, she obtained a Doctorate in Philology. Her area of specialization is Latin American literature, and in particular Cuban literature, with a secondary focus on women’s writing. Professor and academic for many years at the University of Havana, for some years now she has focused on literary production and the promotion of Cuban women writers.
In 2004 she was selected for the MEET program of Writers in Residence at the Maison des Ecrivans et des Traducteurs in Saint-Nazaire, France. There she completed the collection Falsos Documentos, a bilingual (French/Spanish) short story collection. Several of her stories have been translated into German and other languages. Her publications include Havana is a Really Big City (Cubanabooks, 2010), Sangra por la Herida (Cubanabooks, 2011), translated into English by Sara Cooper as The Bleeding Wound (2011). Sangra por la Herida won the Prize of La Academia Cubana de la Lengua.
Mirta Yáñez, Havana Is a Really Big City and other stories. translated by Sara Cooper (Cubanabooks 2010)
Mirta Yáñez, Falsos Documentos (Ediciones Unión 2005).
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Lisa W. Carney is a Postdoctoral Associate for the Department of Dean and the Latin American Studies Center, as well as the coordinator of the Dissertation Success Program for the Graduate School Writing Center. She received her Ph.D. in May 2020 from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, where she specialized in indigenous cultural production, contemporary Latin American literature and Quechua language narrative from the Andes and Amazon region. Her dissertation, “By the Authority of Dreams: Truth and Knowledge in Kichwa Muskuy Narratives” examined how verbal artistry and linguistic elements contribute to credibility and authoritative knowledge in Kichwa-speaking communities of the Ecuadorian tropical forest.Lisa W. Carney is a Postdoctoral Associate for the Department of Dean and the Latin American Studies Center, as well as the coordinator of the Dissertation Success Program for the Graduate School Writing Center. She received her Ph.D. in May 2020 from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, where she specialized in indigenous cultural production, contemporary Latin American literature and Quechua language narrative from the Andes and Amazon region. Her dissertation, “By the Authority of Dreams: Truth and Knowledge in Kichwa Muskuy Narratives” examined how verbal artistry and linguistic elements contribute to credibility and authoritative knowledge in Kichwa-speaking communities of the Ecuadorian tropical forest.
Chad B. Infante is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Jamaica and researches Black and Indigenous U.S. and Caribbean literatures, gender, sexuality, critical theory and political philosophy. His book manuscript, entitled "Cool Fratricide: Murder and Metaphysics in Black and Indigenous U.S. Literature," studies representations of anticolonial murder, vengeance and revenge in Black and Indigenous literature and art as a philosophical response to colonial violence. He is a comparatist and is currently working on several articles that read at the intersection of Black and Native Studies, covering a wide array of topics, from contemporary politics to animated cartoons and from human-animal relations to cosmography.
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Merle Collins is the Director of LASC. She is a professor in the Department of English and a 2018 UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. An excerpt from her 1987 novel Angel was published in Her True True Name. Also a creative writer, Collins is the author of novels, collections of poetry, short story collections, and several critical essays on Caribbean literature and Grenadian culture and politics. Recent essays include “Louise Langdon Norton Little. Grenadian Mother of Malcolm X. Caribbean Quarterly, 2020 and “Explorations of the Self.” Rafael Dalleo & Curdella Forbes, ed., Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920-1970. Volume 2. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
My name is Keisha Allan and I am a native of Trinidad and Tobago. I am currently a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and my broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, I examine Caribbean literature by women of English, Spanish and French expression who deal extensively with the rewriting of the homeland to imagine ways to overcome social and patriarchal repression. My research seeks to investigate the ways in which normative constructions of the homeland are problematized and contested by Caribbean women writers of the late twentieth century.
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Lissette Escariz reads message from Magali García Ramis, Carmen Lugo Filippi, and Mirta Yáñez. Ferrá is an English PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh focusing on Latinx, Caribbean, and Postcolonial literature. She was born and raised in La Habana Del Este, Cuba and has lived most of her time abroad in Miami, FL. In the Spring of 2018 Lissette graduated with a Master's in English from the University of Maryland, where she made LASC her home away from the Caribbean. She was LASC's 2018 Queer/Cuir Americas main conference artist and will once again take on the role for the center’s 2019 Huracán, Tormenta, Storm conference. Aside from her research and other graduate work, Lissette enjoys dancing Cuban salsa, painting watercolors, taking pictures, and spending time by the sea.
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