A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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Lisa Allen-Agostini is a writer and editor from Trinidad and Tobago. An award-winning journalist with a weekly column in the T&T Guardian, she is the author of the tween action-adventure novel The Chalice Project (Macmillan Caribbean, 2008) and co-editor of Trinidad Noir (Akashic Books, 2008). She was short listed for the Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean Writers in 2013 and was the inaugural Dame Hilda Bynoe Writer in Residence at St George’s University, Grenada, in 2014. Her poems and short fiction have been published in sx salon, Susumba’s Book Bag, Tongues of the Ocean, She Sex, and Wasafiri.
Nia Andino is a visual artist, writer, and design assistant in the interior design industry. She has featured twice as a poet at the Nuyorican Poets Café and in the Queens Lit Fest in New York.
Chris Astwood is a Bermudian poet. He was one of a handful of poets invited to perform in the 2009 Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts. His poems have been printed in magazines such as UM-UM, Catch, Iota, The Caribbean Writer, Other Poetry, and Mimesis.
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Andre Bagoo is a poet and journalist living in Trinidad.His second book of poems, BURN, was published by Shearsman Books in 2015 and longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize.
Danielle Bainbridge is a writer of creative non-fiction, drama, and scholarly essays on 19th century black freak show performers. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and is currently pursuing a PhD in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.
Celeste Rita Baker is a Virgin Islander who has published short stories in The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Margin’s Magical Realism and Scarab. She is currently writing a novel about a mouthy Caribbean Saint who reluctantly finds herself in the same body as a sad and lonely Black woman in a futuristic New York City.
Nigel Barto is a novelist, playwright, director, producer, filmmaker, designer, and poet. His works include three books, two plays, a short film, and a small line of word art t-shirts. Barto began by writing poems for his mum in the second grade. He has formed BartoSpeak, which produces and promotes spoken word events in Trinidad and Tobago. His poetry has appeared in The Rusty Nail and The Literary Bohemian. He enjoys traveling and meeting new people, and his motto is “Enjoy the Journey.”
La Vaughn Belle was born in 1974 in Trinidad & Tobago, and lives and works in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. She studied at Columbia University in New York and the Institute of Fine Art in Cuba. Her work has evolved from figurative and symbolic explorations in painting to a variety of modes that include video, performance, installation and public intervention projects. The emphasis of her work does not lie in the medium, but in creating a dialogic space to explore the relationship between art and daily life. Along with several personal shows, she has exhibited in the Caribbean, the US and Europe. She is currently completing a documentary film entitled The House That Freedom Built.
Jacqueline Bishop was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She currently teaches at New York University, where she earned her M.A. in English & American Literature, and her M.F.A. in fiction writing. She has been awarded a UNESCO/Fulbright fellowship, The Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities, and five Jamaica Cultural Development Commission awards, among many other honors. Her work explores issues of home, ancestry, family, connectivity and belonging.
Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and artist from Trinidad. Her work has been featured in several international journals. She was awarded the Charlotte and Isidor Paeiwonsky Prize by The Caribbean Writer’s editorial board in 2009, nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, and awarded the Small Axe Poetry Prize in 2012. Danielle’s first solo art exhibition, Criatura, was held in June 2013 at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago.
Victoria Brown is the author of Minding Ben, Hyperion 2011 (released in paperback as Grace in the City, 2012). She has been profiled in the New York Times, New York Newsday, Library Journal, The Trinidad Guardian, and other publications. She has an MFA in Fiction from Hunter College. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, NBCnews.com, Sunday Salon, Babble and Bookreporter.com, and is forthcoming in New York Magazine. She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College, and is currently at work on her second novel.
Tammi Browne-Bannister is an Antiguan living in Barbados. Her stories have won awards at the annual National Independence Festival of Cultural Arts (NIFCA) in Barbados. She studies creative writing at The Barbados Community College and her work has been published online by Anansesem and St. Somewhere Press. Her work will also be featured in Winning Words – a NIFCA anthology.
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Kivel Carson is a writer, reader, and adventurer with Caribbean and Hoosier roots. She’s a staff writer for an online pop culture magazine, and a budding indie filmmaker. She graduated from Indiana University with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. Her fiction is influenced by the experiences of the African diaspora in the West. She spent time in Ghana exploring the roots of the diaspora and the history and culture of the region. Her mother and much of her mother’s side of the family still live in St. Thomas, USVI.
Christopher Cartright grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He obtained his MFA from Florida State University and lives in Savannah, GA. He teaches at Armstrong University and edits Blacktop Passages.
Morgan Christie’s work has appeared in Hippocampus, Blackberry, Germ Magazine, Bitchin’ Kitsch, Vagabonds, Anthology of the Mad Ones, and was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s 2013 Family Matters competition. She has dedicated “Right Side Up” to her grandmother, Edith, a woman of great fortitude, wit, and effervescent fervor – and whom Morgan loves deeply.
Andrea Chung is an artist working and living in San Diego, California. Her work explores themes of labor and materials and their relationships with ‘post colonial’ societies. Her work has appeared in venues including the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Art Museum of the Americas, and Medulla Gallery. She has been published in ARC, Small Axe, and Harvard’s Transitions and Representations. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and has lectured at MICA, Tulane and the Claremont Colleges.
Loretta Collins Klobah is a Full Professor of Caribbean Literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. She has published or has poetry forthcoming in several journals, including The Caribbean Writer, Bim, Poui, Caribbean Beat, The New Yorker, TriQuaterly Review, Black Warrior Review, The Antioch Review, Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, and The Missouri Review. Her debut poetry collection, The Twelve-Foot Neon Woman (Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, 2011), received the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry (Trinidad and Tobago). It was also one of five books short-listed for the 2012 Felix Dennis Prize for the Best First Collection, offered by Forward Arts Foundation in the UK. She has received a Pushcart Prize and the Earl Lyons Award from the American Academy of Poets. She was one of eight poets to be published in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry (Carcanet Press, 2007), edited by Kei Miller.
Mark James Cooper is a writer from Trinidad & Tobago. He is a graduate of Temple University with a B.A. in English Education and Africana Studies. He currently lives in Philadelphia.
Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-born writer and illustrator. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and currently lives in Miami, FL.
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Kwame Dawes is an award-winning Ghanian-born Jamaican poet who has authored sixteen books of poetry and numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program.
Leigha-Ceres de Roche, age 17, is a student at Bishops Anstey High School in Trinidad and Tobago. She is passionate about language and enjoys writing poetry and works of fiction. She is an avid animal lover and is a member of the Trinidad and Tobago Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Florine Demosthene earned her BFA from Parsons the New School for Design and her MFA from Hunter College. She has shown extensively through group and solo exhibitions in London and in various cities in the USA. She was a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2011 and she was featured in the premiere issue of ARC. She is a 2012 Keyholder resident at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York.
Aragorn Dick-Read was born in Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands in 1966. A European education introduced him to many artistic techniques such as pottery, print making, design and metal work. He complimented his studies with a degree in Art History, specializing in Tribal and Twentieth century art, architecture and design. Aragorn’s art work has been exhibited in London (St Martins in the Fields and Smiths gallery, Covent garden), New York (Cast Iron gallery, Soho), St Barths (Bank of Baghdad), Antigua (Harmony Hall), and Tortola, BVI.
Anaïs Duplan is the author of a forthcoming collection of poems titled Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, Spring 2016). Her poems and essays have appeared in Hyperallergic, Phantom Limb, [PANK], Birdfeast, and Dreginald, among others. She is a staff music writer for Decoder Magazine and No Fear of Pop as well as an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lastly, she acts as the founding curator of an international arts network called The Spacesuits, whose objective is to foster new works on the ethno- and Afro-future.
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Summer Edward was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She holds an M.S.Ed. degree in Reading, Writing, Literacy from the University of Pennsylvania and is the recipient of a Roothbert Fellowship. Her writing and art have been published in tongues of the ocean, St. Somewhere Journal, sx salon, BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, The Columbia Review, The Caribbean Writer, Philadelphia Stories, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora and more. She was a Writer-in-Residence with the Cropper Foundation Caribbean Creative Writers Residential Workshop and was shortlisted for the 2012 Small Axe Literary Prize in the fiction category. She currently lives in Philadelphia, USA.
Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz is a poet and translator from Carolina, Puerto Rico. His poetry has been featured in The Acentos Review, The Atlas Review, What I Am Not a Painter, Entasis Journal, SAND, and elsewhere. An essay and a book review are also forthcoming in The Caribbean Writer and Caribbean Studies, respectively. He is a doctoral candidate in Caribbean Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Ri’o Piedras. His research interests include violence in the novels of Guadeloupean writer Maryse Conde’ and how it relates to the broader historical constructs of the Caribbean.
Carlos Estevez is a Cuban artist living in Miami. His work has been exhibited in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, Cuba; Los Angeles; Center of Contemporary Art in New Orleans; Switzerland; Paris; Japan; Spain, and elsewhere. In 2009 he had his first retrospective at UB Galleries, Buffalo University, NY. His work is part of several museum collections including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana in Cuba, The Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and Miami Art Museum.
Jon Euwema is a St. Thomian designer, visual artist and poet. He was one of several V.I. artists included in a presentation given on Virgin Islands contemporary artists at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba in 2015. His latest project is a series of limited-edition prints dealing with V.I. vernacular dialect.
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Sonia Farmer is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a small fine press that produces hand-bound limited-edition chapbooks of Caribbean writing, based out of The Bahamas. Her poetry has won the 2011 Small Axe Literary Competition in Poetry and has also appeared in various publications including Poui, The Caribbean Writer, and WomanSpeak. Her hand-made books and paper have appeared in several exhibitions in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. She presently works as an archivist and communications coordinator with The Current art team at Baha Mar. She holds a BFA in Writing from Pratt institute.
Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, M.J. Fievre published her first mystery novel, Le Feu de la Vengeance, at the age of sixteen. At nineteen, she signed her first book contract with Hachette-Deschamps, in Haiti, for the publication of a Young Adult book titled La Statuette Malefique. Since then, M.J. has authored nine books in French. Two years ago, One Moore Book released M.J.’s children’s book, I am Riding, written in three languages: English, French, and Haitian Creole. M.J. holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from Barry University and an MFA from the Creative Writing program at Florida International University. She taught writing at Nova Middle School in Davie, FL, and is currently a professor at Miami Dade College. She’s the founding editor of Sliver of Stone Magazine.
Soyini Ayanna Forde is a writer, feminist and tea drinker from Trinidad and Tobago. She has had work featured on Racialicious, inside Black Renaissance Noire, The Guidebook, The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe Literary Salon, St. Somewhere Journal and in Tongues of the Ocean. Her first poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.
Del Foxton is an artist working primarily in handmade paper. In 2005 she founded Adagio Art Gallery & Studio on Grand Bahama Island, where she creates and exhibits her paper artworks which mainly use local vegetation as a resource. Her work also frequently incorporates discarded objects, and she is delighted that in her small way she can lessen her carbon footprint while indulging in her passion.
Robin Fredey is a visual artist and teacher. She holds a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a MS in Art Education from Massachusetts College of Art. She is the co-founder of ARTfusion publishing. She lives on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the 2014 recipient of the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry, and is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a 2014 recipient of a Talbot International Award for writing. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as La Respuesta, Alicante’s Información, fields, Pretty Owl Poetry, and elsewhere.
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Kavita Ganness is a literary and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. Her collection of poems, Emerald Journey was published by the New Voices Press. She has been published in Generation Lion Magazine, The Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, She SEX Prose & Poetry Sex and the Caribbean Woman, as well as Susumba’s Book Bag. She was a participant in the Cropper Foundation’s 8th Residential Creative Writers Workshop in Balandra, Trinidad, and has mentored with renowned Caribbean writer Earl Lovelace. She is a member of the Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago (WUTT).
G. A. Gardner was born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and migrated to the USA in 1988 where he earned his BA in Visual Arts and MA from San Francisco State University. He also received a Ph.D. in Art Education from The Ohio State University where he focused on Computer Fine Art and Animation. At the age of 25 Gardner was appointed as a full-time professor of art at William Paterson University and prepared students for animation careers at major studios such as Pixar Animation Studio, Industrial Light and Magic and DreamWorks SKG. During this time he authored 25 text books and published over 100 books on the subject of art education. Gardner has lectured and been an art education consultant at various universities including UCLA, Fashion Institute of Technology, and Florida A&M University. He has also served as associate professor at George Mason University and professor of art at University of the District of Columbia. His work has been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the USA, Asia and the Caribbean including the James E. Lewis Museum of Art; Paterson Museum, New Jersey; Nanjing College of Art, China; Corridor Gallery, New York; Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, St Croix, USVI; Bergen Museum, New Jersey and Morton Fine Art, DC. He has been awarded artist residencies in the Caribbean and Asia.
Juleus Ghunta is a motivational speaker and poet. He has a B.A. in Media from the University of the West Indies, Mona (2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BIM, Bookends (Jamaica Observer), Poetry Pacific, Susumba’s Book Bag and Poui.
Dawne Gowrie-Zetterstrom began writing at the age of 8 years old, and loved words because of her grandfather who was a storyteller and her father who was prone to compulsive recitations of poetry. She studied Creative Writing with Earl Lovelace as her tutor. Her stories have appeared in Ananseesem and The New Local.
Yashika Graham was born in Westmoreland, Jamaica. She is an Executive Member of the Poetry Society of Jamaica, serving as its Administrator and Moderator of its Monthly Poetry Fellowships. Her work has been showcased for audiences in Jamaica, the United States, and as part of Jamaica Rising and the Bristol Festival of Literature in the United Kingdom. Her poems have been published in The Caribbean Writer Volume 27, 2013, and her poems and flash fiction in Susumba’s Book Bag, 2015. Her chapbook will be released in 2015, to be followed by her first full collection of poems.
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Joanne C. Hillhouse is the author of four books: The Boy from Willow Bend, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, children’s picture book Fish Outta Water, and Oh Gad!. She has been published in several international journals and anthologies including For Women: In Tribute to Nina Simone, In the Black: New African Canadian Literature, and So the Nailhead Bend So the Story End: an Anthology of Antiguan and Barbudan Writing. She has fiction forthcoming in Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean. She lives in Antigua, where she freelances across borders as a writer, editor, and writing coach. She runs the Wadadli Pen writing programme.
Daisy Holder Lafond was born on St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. A former V.I. Daily News editor, her writings have appeared in various publications. She owned and published The V.I. Voice magazine and was The Caribbean Writer’s 2012 winner of the Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize. She is a mother and grandmother and lives on St. Croix.
Jannine Horsford is an instructor in English living in Trinidad and Tobago. She is a Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Workshop 2014 fellow and, most recently, has has had poems published in Susumba’s Bookbag Issue 5.
Kevin Jared Hosein currently resides in Trinidad and Tobago and is the Caribbean regional winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His first book, Littletown Secrets, was published in 2013. In addition to having fiction published in the Hugo Award-winning Lightspeed Magazine and The Caribbean Review of Books, his work has been featured in anthologies such as Pepperpot, New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, Jewels of the Caribbean and the Akashic Books series, Mondays are Murder and Duppy Thursdays. He has also been shortlisted twice for the Small Axe Prize for Prose. His poem, “The Wait is So, So Long” was adapted into a short film that was awarded a Gold Key by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. His novel, The Repenters, will be published by Peepal Tree Press in 2016.
Nadia Huggins is a self-taught conceptual documentary photographer from St Vincent & the Grenadines. Her photographs explore Caribbean culture and identity through people, self-portraits and the landscape. Her work has been published in, Pictures from Paradise: A Survey of Contemporary Caribbean Photography, and See me here: A Survey of Contemporary Self-Portraits from the Caribbean. She has exhibited work in Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions in Washington, DC.; Pictures from Paradise at the CONTACT Photography Festival in Toronto, Canada; and In Another Place, And Here at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, BC, Canada. She has received a photography award at the FESTIVAL CARIBEEN DE L’IMAGE du Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe for her Circa no future series. Huggins is also the co-founder of ARC Magazine and a full time freelance graphic designer.
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Parris Jaru is a Brooklyn-based artist who was born in Jamaica. He has displayed his work at galleries throughout New York City. His influences include Picasso, Van Gogh, Basquiat, Warhol, and the energy, vibrancy of color, and folkloric allusions of Afro-Caribbean art.
jennifer jazz is a New York based memoirist. Her work has recently appeared in publications that include Booth, Sukoon and Sensitive Skin.
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Arnulfo Kantun was born July 30, 1973 in Belize and worked in Guyana and Jamaica as a Project Coordinator in various areas of Public Health. He has a keen interest in Mayan archaeology, farming and issues affecting First Nations People in the region.
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Reuel Lewi is a Guyanese poet and dramatist. He holds a Bsc-Sociology from the University of Guyana and has published in Poui, Guyana Christmas Annual Timbucktu and Small Axe. He lives in Anguilla.
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Armando Mariño was born in Santiago, Cuba in 1968. He has been a recipient of several grants and residencies and his work has been included in many collective shows around the world. His work is part of many private and public collections including The National Museum of Havana, Deutsche Bank Collection, Coca Cola Foundation, Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection, Howard Farber Collection, The Berado Collection, the Museum of Contemprary Art of Vigo and others.
Manuel Mathieu completed his Bachelor’s in Visual and Media Arts at the University of Quebec at Montreal in December 2010. He began a Masters at Goldsmiths University of London in September 2013. His work has been exhibited in Haiti, Canada, the United States, France, and in several international fairs. His work has also been presented at the Museum of the Americas in Washington and will be shown at the Museum of Civilisation in Quebec in November 2013. Manuel was born in Port-au-Prince and lives and works in Montreal.
Monique McIntosh is a short story writer from Kingston, Jamaica. She is currently completing her second year in the MFA fiction program at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, Florida.
Elsa María Meléndez Torres is a writer, painter and creator of installations. She studied at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she earned a BFA in 1997. She won first prize in the Engraving Arts Competition of the Puerto Rican Athenaeum in 2006 as well as a Lexus scholarship in 2010. From 1999 to 2006 she worked as Exhibition Coordinator at the Museum of Art Exhibition of Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she now serves as Curator.
Shansi Miller was born on St. Thomas. Her idealized photorealist paintings, often narrative in nature, reflect a love and strong identification with both the natural and cultural environments of the Virgin Islands. Her work hangs in international collections.
Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet. Her book Somersault is forthcoming from Guernica Editions. Her poems have appeared in Agenda, Stand, Magma, The Caribbean Writer, tongues of the ocean,Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature, Theodate and elsewhere. She has an M Litt in Creative Writing from University of Glasgow, is a MacDowell Fellow and teaches poetry workshops in Bermuda.
Rajiv Mohabir received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY where he was Editor in Chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal. He is the winner of 2015 AWP Intro Journal Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut (Spring 2016), as well as a recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and the 2015 Kundiman Prize for his manuscript The Cowherd’s Son. Rajiv received fellowships from Voices of Our Nation’s Artist foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His poetry and translations are internationally published or forthcoming from journals such as Best American Poetry 2015, Quarterly West, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, Anti-, Great River Review, PANK, and Aufgabe.
Aurora Molina was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1984. She emigrated to the United States at the age of 16, where she opted to pursue an education in art. Molina received her Associate’s Degree in Visual Arts from Miami Dade College, her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts specializing in Mixed Media from Florida International University and her Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art from the Universidad Europea de Madrid in 2009. She has exhibited extensively in Miami as well as in Peru and Mexico.
Piaget Moss, is presently pursuing an AA in Art at The College of The Bahamas. While there she has participated in Sketch24, Popopstudios International Centre of Visual Arts (2013) and is currently at work on upcoming exhibitions set for later in the year, which include the Art Department’s End of Year Exhibition at The College of The Bahamas, and the third annual All-star Amateur Art Exhibition at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas.
Jasmine Murrell is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who received her BFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design. Her works have been featured in venues including the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts, the Detroit African American Museum/ The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit institute of Arts Museum, the Toronto Biennial, and Art Basel.
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Dalton Narine is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker. Born in Trinidad, he migrated to the United States and has worked as a journalist and as an editor for the Village Voice, Ebony, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and The Miami Herald. His latest film MasMan is a portrait of the Trinidadian designer Peter Minshall. Narine, who suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, is a decorated veteran of the American war in Vietnam.
Ronnel Nurse is 23 & Afro-Trinidadian. When he isn’t battling his social media addiction & debating possible Game of Thrones scenarios, he spends his time cloud watching, reading, writing, swooning over poetry & working on his fitness to try out for the justice league. He’s also a full time Christian who’s saved by grace though faith.
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Lizbette Ocasio-Russe is a graduate student pursuing an MA in English at the University of Puerto Rico. She received her BA in Journalism and Romance Languages, with a Minor in Creative Writing, from New York University. Her work has been published in Tonguas (PR), and is forthcoming in Poui (Barbados).
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Opal Palmer Adisa is a Jamaican-born writer with seven books to her credit. Her book of poetry, Tamarind and Mango Women, won the 1992 American Book Award. Adisa is also a renowned educator in the area of diversity work, and her workshops examine racism, sexism, homophobia and internalized oppression using literature as a springboard to explore and probe these learned behaviors. Dr. Adisa has two masters degrees from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at California College of the Arts, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and The University of the Virgin Islands, where she also served as editor of The Caribbean Writer.
Petra Pierre–Robertson is currently the Library Director of University of the Southern Caribbean, a position she has held for the past fourteen years. A graduate student of the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Jamaica, she received the prize for creative writing during her undergraduate study at UWI, St. Augustine where she completed a BA in English. She completed a Master of Library Science Degree at UWI, Mona. She is pursuing another graduate degree the MA Literatures in English at UWI, St. Augustine. She is currently a writer for a religious journal.
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Noel Quiñones is an AfroBoricua writer born and raised in the Bronx. He is a 2016 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House, 2016 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2015 John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize winner. Quiñones has spent almost a decade working as a teaching artist, slam coach, and youth development coordinator with artists of all ages across the globe. His performances have been featured on Button Poetry, Vibe, and Blavity. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Pilgrimage Press, Winter Tangerine Review, and The Acentos Review.
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Genieve Ramrattan is a final-year student at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus in the design strand of the BA Visual Arts program. Genieve is a National Additional Scholarship winner, and the recipient of a UWI Open Scholarship. She has also been awarded the Eastman-Christensen Visual Arts Award for Excellence in Year 2 while at UWI. She is a Global Young Leaders Conference alum, a Collegiate Presidential Inaugural Conference alum, and an invitee to the China 2014 Global Youth Forum on International Diplomacy.
April Roach has previously been published in Cobalt Magazine and is currently residing in Paris. She studies English literature and Creative Writing at Warwick University in England. She was born in London and later moved to Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
Colin Robinson has been writing about belonging, gender, desire, place and loss through three decades of movements between his boyhood home in Diego Martin, Trinidad and New York City where he lived as an “illegal alien” for a decade. He is currently working on a new project of building a Caribbean movement for sexual citizenship. His essays and poems have appeared in Black Gay Genius: Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, Zócalo, Opinion, Caribbean Erotic, and Calabash.
Lizza Rodriguez is a sophomore at New College of Florida. Though she is a political science major, she has been writing for eight years and considers poetry her greatest passion. Recently, Lizza has begun work on a collection of poems that focuses on her parents’ immigration to the United States from the Dominican Republic. In her free time, Lizza does work on behalf of local immigration advocacy group in hopes of shedding light on the state of immigration and racial/ethnic relations in the U.S.
Althea Romeo-Mark was born in Antigua, West Indies and grew up in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in The Virgin Islands, The United States, Liberia, England, and Switzerland, where she has resided since 1991. The stories of immigrants, their suffering and survival are a major inspiration for her poems. She was awarded the Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize by the Editorial Board of The Caribbean Writer in June, 2009. She was one of a hundred guest poets invited to read at the XX International Poetry Festival of Medellin, Colombia 2010. Her recent work has been included in Poems for the Hazara: An Anthology and Collaborative Poem, WomanSpeak: A journal of writing and Art by Caribbean Women, The Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books, Step Away Magazine, and KRITYA.
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Hadiya Sewer is a third year PhD student in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. She earned her B.A. in Sociology from Spelman College where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Hadiya’s many research interests include Africana feminism, Western empires and Caribbean subject formation, Caribbean philosophy, and radical political thought. She is one of the co organizers of the “Decolonizing the Racialized Female Subject: Black and Indigenous Women’s Self Making Under Empire” symposium. Her prospective dissertation examines the impact of American colonial rule on sovereignty, and questions of “the human” in the United States Virgin Islands. The project asks, “what does the continuous colonial subjection of the United States Virgin Islands tell us about blackness in the margins of the American empire?”
Vanessa Simmons was born and raised on Bequia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines. She received an Honours BA in Comparative Literature and Culture from UWO in Canada. She has been published throughout the Caribbean, Canada and the US. She currently works as a Library Assistant and is a contributing editor at ARC Magazine.
Lou Smith is an Australian poet of Jamaican heritage. Her poetry has appeared in various Australian and international journals and anthologies including Wasafiri, The Caribbean Writer, EnterText and Small Axe Literary Salon. Lou holds a PhD in creative writing from The University of Melbourne, Australia.
Celia Sorhaindo was born on the Nature Island of Dominica, lived many years in the UK and returned home in 2005. She is currently the Dominica coordinator for a US charity organisation, Hands Across the Sea, which aims to help raise child literacy levels in the Eastern Caribbean by shipping new books to schools and assisting with the creation and maintenance of school libraries. She is also a self-employed artisan and photographer; member of the Dominica Arts & Crafts Producers Association and the Nature Island Literary Festival. She is the co-compiler of Home Again – Stories of Migration and Return; a collection of contemporary real-life stories by men and women who have returned to Dominica, published by Papillote Press.
Imran Stephen is a photographer born in St. Lucia who is currently based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He first moved to St. John as a teenager. His series “Faces of St. John” was displayed at Motu in 2014.
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Suzanne Uzzilia is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and an adjunct lecturer in English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, in Queens, New York. Her dissertation research examines contemporary Caribbean women’s writing.
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Niarus Walker is an artist and arts educator living in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She has a BFA in Fashion Design and Painting from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, and an MS in Art Education from Florida State University. She was awarded the Robert Rauschenberg Power of Art Workshop Fellowship in 2003 and the F. Decastro Fellowship in 2004. She has also received The Alpha Delta Kappa Visual Arts Award (2004), the Mary Lou and Ernestine Kuhn Scholarship (2005), and the Sarah Peter Travel Fellowship to study batik in Indonesia (1992). Her work has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Island Art and Soul, and St. Croix This Week.
Angelika Wallace-Whitfield is a painter who was born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1993 and has lived between the Bahamas and the United Kingdom. She is curator of the D’Aguilar Art Foundation and a curatorial assistant at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas.
Brad Walrond is a poet, writer, performer and activist born in Brooklyn New York to first generation Caribbean parents from Barbados. He has served as Assistant to the National Program Director of Pathways to Teaching Careers and as Director of Education at FACES—the historic non-profit in Harlem New York first to respond to the HIV pandemic targeting at-risk populations of color.
Nilsa Wheatley studied art at the American College in London and later at Parsons School of Design in New York. She is a full time artist who resides in Tortola, British Virgin Islands.
H. K. Williams is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. In 2014 she was mentored by Earl Lovelace as an apprentice of the Mentoring with the Masters Programme, which was facilitated by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. After successfully completing the programme she was invited by Monique Roffey to join her writers’ lab in Belmont, where she is currently working on producing a collection of short stories. Her story “Election Night Fever” was featured in Voicing our Vision, a short-story anthology published by the Writers Union of Trinidad and Tobago in 2013. She is currently looking forward to the publication of her short story “Cascadura” in New World, Old Ways, an upcoming Peekash anthology of Speculative Fiction later this year.
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