Who’s Your Daddy?:And Other Stories Has Arrived!

As you can see from the photo, I’m really proud of Who’s Your Daddy?:And Other Stories, my latest collection which will be released by Peepal Tree Press in the next few weeks. Who’s Your Daddy? brings together many of the themes from my first collection, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien, and also pushes my work in some new and exciting directions.


I’m thinking about “Cry to Me” and “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” where I’m not only signifyin’ on two reggae choons, but I’m exploring the themes of eroticism and domestic violence respectively. Also in “Bobby Bijani and the Rolling Calf” I wanted to see if Jamaican/ Caribbean magical realism could survive in South Florida, and to include another Asian character (as I had done in Uncle Obadiah and the Alien) because the Asian experience is a part of the Caribbean matrix.


Of course, there are the recurrent themes from Uncle Obadiah and the Alien: gender issues, the dilemmas of fatherless boys, and the disruptive effects of the Jamaican Diaspora on family and community life.


Who’s Your Daddy took me ten years to write and some of the stories have appeared in several journals: "Third Time" in Avocado Magazine; "Who's Your Daddy?" in Small Axe - A caribbean platform for criticism; "Beeline and Babylon" in The Caribbean Writer; "Coward Men Keep Sound Bones" in Asili :the Journal; "I Want to Disturb my Neighbor" in Julie Mango Online Journal of Creative Expressions & revised in Iron Balloons: Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop, and "Sister Faye and the Dreadlocked Vampire" in OBSIDIAN : Literature in the African Diaspora. Some of the stories even helped me to win an award or two.


In other words, Who’s Your Daddy? presents the “best” work that I’ve written in the past decade, and I’ll be reading from this collection at Calabash 2009 on May 22-24, 2009.

Drop by and see me, nuh?

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