Geoffrey Philp: May 2011

May 30, 2011

Exonerate Marcus Garvey: News Flash

Miami, May 30, 2011 - A group of artists across North America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean have created an online petition to request a full pardon for Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, and a national hero of Jamaica. The goal is to get 10,000 signatures and to deliver the petition to President Barack Obama.

“When I read about the efforts of the Hon. Olivia ‘Babsy’ Grange in Jamaica, I decided to begin a similar movement here in North America,” said Mr. Geoffrey Philp, a Jamaican author and poet. “Marcus Garvey has long been an inspiration because of the values of self-reliance and industry to which he devoted his life.

After corresponding via email with other writers and artists, we decided to create a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ExonerateMarcusGarvey and to put the petition online http://signon.org/sign/exonerate-marcus-garvey?source=c.url&r_by=4631897
so that anyone who cares about justice can join in the cause.”

We are petitioning President Barack Obama to exonerate the Rt. Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey, leader of the first and largest economic justice movement in the USA and the world, and the first named National Hero of Jamaica.

On January 12, 1922, Marcus Garvey, founder of the UNIA, was arrested by the Bureau of Investigation and charged with mail fraud. In 1925, Marcus Garvey began serving a five-year sentence in the US penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. After several appeals, his sentence was eventually commuted by President Calvin Coolidge, and he was deported to Jamaica. It is now abundantly clear (and legal scholars agree) that Garvey did not commit any criminal acts, but as Professor Judith Stein has stated, “his politics were on trial."

We think the President will agree that this year, 2012, the 125th anniversary of Marcus Garvey's birth, is a most timely moment to correct this historic miscarriage of justice.

“This is a cause that President Barack Obama can fully embrace,” Philp continued. “In Dreams From my Father, President Obama has acknowledged Garvey’s influence by quoting one of Garvey’s more famous lines: “Rise up, ye mighty race.”

For more information, please call 786-556-7192 or visit: http://signon.org/sign/exonerate-marcus-garvey?source=c.url&r_by=4631897

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Related Sites:

http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house/house10cal/102con/271.pdf

http://www.marcusmosiahgarvey.org/images/HCONRES84.pdf

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hc110-24&tab=committees

http://www.international.ucla.edu/africa/mgpp/sound.asp (2 sound clips of his voice)

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hc111-44

PBS timeline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/timeline/timeline2.html

FBI files:
http://www.marcusgarvey.com/wmview.php?ArtCat=10

http://www.archive.org/details/MarcusGarveyHearingBeforeTheSubcommitteeOnCriminalJustice

FOI files:

http://www.archive.org/details/MarcusGarveysFbiFilePart1

Happy Memorial Day (2011)

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May 28, 2011

2011 FIU/Books & Books International Writers Conference--Grand Cayman

2011 FIU/Books & Books International Writers Conference--Grand Cayman

Co-sponsored by FIU's MFA Program in Creative Writing and Books & Books, along with Camana Bay, Sunshine Suites Resort, Cayman Airways & the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism.
Co-Directors: Mitchell Kaplan, Books & Books; Les Standiford, Director of FIU's MFA in Creative Writing.

Dates: October 20-22, 2011

Conference Faculty:

COLIN CHANNER (Satisfy My Soul) Fiction
MARK KURLANSKY(Salt, A World Without Fish)Non-Fiction
ELLEN SUSSMAN (French Lessons)Novel
THOMAS LUX (God Particles)Poetry
KIM WITHERSPOON Founding Partner, Inkwell Management LiteraryAgency
GERALD COSTANZO Founder, Carnegie Mellon University Press
DEBRA DEAN (The Madonnas of Leningrad) Novel
CAMPBELL McGRATH (Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis & Clark Expedition) Poetry
LES STANDIFORD (Bringing Adam Home)Narrative Non-Fiction
JOHN DUFRESNE (Requiem, Mass.) Fiction
LYNNE BARRETT (Magpies) Fiction & Revision
ROBERT ROTSTEIN, Esq. (Entertainment attorney)

Tuition: Special early-bird rate--$325, prior to August 1, 2011
Manuscript (Mss.) Conferences: $50.00 [Limited availability]

Conference Hotel: Sunshine Suites Resort, Grand Cayman. $105 studio; $115 deluxe studio; $130 deluxe 1BR suite. Rates include complimentary wireless internet and daily breakfast. Call 877.786.1110, toll free, or visit their web site at http://www.sunshinesuites.com/. Use code FIUWW1.

Nine daily classes in all genres; afternoon editing and publishing symposia; evening readings.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CALL 305-919-5857 or e-mail: campbet@fiu.edu.
Faxed reservations cannot be accepted at this time.

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May 27, 2011

"Miss Sally on Politics" by Shara McCallum

Miss Sally on Politics

He is a one-eye man
in a blind-eye country.

But how him can do better
when no one want to see

what going on. Every time
party man come around

him jumping up and down—
lickle puppy eager fi please.

Him tell mi is not woman
business, this election.

Is not fi mi fi understand.
Mi tell yu all the same what I know:

If yu see jack ass,
don’t yu must ride it?

From Shara McCallum's This Strange Land.

About Shara McCallum

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents and moved to the U.S. at the age of nine. She earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York.

Her books of poetry include Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have won a college prize from The Academy of American Poets, been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and appeared in several journals, including The Antioch Review,Chelsea, The Iowa Review, and Verse. McCallum's poems have been anthologized in The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (ed. Michael Collier, 2000) and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. McCallum lives in Pennsylvania and teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She is also on the faculty of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA program.

Source: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/438

Image: http://www.bucknell.edu/x3695.xml

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http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/caribbean-and-its-cultural-arts-when.htm
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/dear-mikey-jiggs-greetings-mikey-on.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/half-thats-never-been-told-fractured.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/funny-thing-happened-on-way-to.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/terrible-beauty-is-born-jamaica-in.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2007/01/dear-mikey-in-last-few-posts-i-have.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2006/07/genesis-of-benjamin-my-son-part-1-of-2.html
http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2006/07/genesis-of-benjamin-my-son-part-2_06.html

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May 26, 2011

Book Review: The Frock & Other Poems by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards

The Frock & Other Poems by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards

Nature is not Innocent in the St. Martin Yard of Yaya Richards

Review by Alex Richards.

The Frock & Other Poems by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards celebrates her memory, her words, her thoughts, the sentiments and feelings that drove her actions in favor of a more vibrant cultural expression, and a recognition of what it means to be from and for St. Martin.

When the book was launched in Marigot in February 2011, as the highlight of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day, it served as the best way to honor the late Yaya, a contemporary St. Martin woman of significance and an activist in her own right.

Over the last few days, re-reading The Frock & Other Poems and attempting to refresh a brief critique of the book, stirred aspects of my whole being, my past, my present, my future, my foundation as well as the identity I am still busy building, my internal construction, my nature.

For more, please visit: http://www.smn-news.com/st-maarten-st-martin-news/6710-the-frock-a-other-poems-nature-is-not-innocent-in-the-st-martin-yard-of-yaya-richards-by-alex-richards.html

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May 25, 2011

New Book: The Ladies are Upstairs by Merle Collins

From the 1930s to the new century, Doux Thibaut, one of Merle Collins’ most memorable characters, negotiates a hard life on the Caribbean island of Paz. As a child there is the shame of poverty and illegitimacy, and there are the hazards of sectarianism in an island divided between Catholic and Protestant, the rigidity of a class and racial system where, if you are black, your white employer is always right—and only the ladies live upstairs. Doux confronts all such challenges with style and hidden steel.

We leave Doux as an old lady moving between the homes of her children in Boston and New York, wondering whether they and her grandchildren really appreciate what her engagement with life has taught her.

In these tender and moving stories, Merle Collins demands that we do not forget such lives. If ghosts appear in several of the later stories, they are surely there to warn that amnesia about the past can leave disturbed and restless spirits behind.

In addition to the Doux stories, this collection restores to print an earlier ‘Paz’ story, “Rain Darling”, and their juxtaposition contrasts two very different responses to the hazards of life.

Merle Collins is Grenadian. She is the author of two novels, a collection of short stories and two previous collections of poetry. She teaches Caribbean literature at the University of Maryland.

About Merle Collins

Merle Collins was born in 1950 in Aruba to Grenadian parents, she was taken to Grenada shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St Georges. She graduated from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where she took a degree in English and in Spanish. After graduating in 1972, she returned to Grenada, where she taught History and Spanish for the next two years. She has also taught in St Lucia. In 1980 she was awarded a Masters Georgetown University in Latin American Studies.

She was deeply involved in the Grenadian revolution and served as a coordinator for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean for the Government of Grenada. She left Grenada in 1983.

Her first collection of poetry Because the Dawn Breaks was published by Karia Press in 1985. At this time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime and African music. In 1987, she published her first novel Angel, which follows the lives of both Angel and the Grenadian people as they struggle for independence. This was followed by a collection of short stories, Rain Darling in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995.

She is currently Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World, and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition.

Source: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/home.asp

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May 24, 2011

Derek Walcott Keynote Speaker: 9th Annual St. Martin Book Fair

Source: House of Nehesi Publishers
http://www.sxmislandtime.com/component/content/article/14404-nobel-prize-laureate-derek-walcott-to-speak-in-st-martin.html

Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott is the confirmed keynote speaker for the 9th annual St. Martin Book Fair, June 2 - 4, 2011..

“Freedom of Expression” is the theme of the three-day fair that opens with Walcott’s address at the Chamber of Commerce Building in Spring Concordia, Marigot, June 2, at 8 PM.

St. Martin lovers of reading, writing, good books, Caribbean culture, and just plain culture chic – along with visitors to the island – will get a front-row seat to see, hear and meet the world-acclaimed St. Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

In 2011, the much-in-demand Walcott won the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK and Trinidad’s BOCAS literary prize for White Egrets, his new and 14th book of poems.

P.O. Box 460
Philipsburg, St. Martin
Caribbean
Tel (599) 554-7089
E-mail: Offshoreediting@hotmail.com

Contact
Shujah Reiph
Tel. (590.690) 30.73.66
Jacqueline Sample
nehesi@sintmaarten.net

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May 23, 2011

New Book: The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives

The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives

The short story has been integral to the development of Caribbean literature, and continues to offer possibilities for invention and reinvigoration. As the most comprehensive study of its kind, this important and timely volume explores the significance of the short story form to Caribbean cultural production across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twenty original essays collected here offer a unique set of inquiries and insights into the historical, cultural and stylistic characteristics of Caribbean short story writing.

The book draws together diverse critical perspectives from established and emerging scholars, including Shirley Chew, Alison Donnell, James Procter, Raymond Ramcharitar and Elaine Savory. Essays cover the publishing histories of specific islands; intersections of the local, global and diasporic; treatments of race and gender; language, orality and genre; and cultural contexts from tourism to calypso to cricket.

Table of Contents

The Editors

Dr Lucy Evans is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published a number of articles on Caribbean and black British writing, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Communities in Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories.

Emma Smith has a PhD in narrative theory and contemporary fiction from the University of Leeds. She has lectured in post/colonial literature and history at Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan universities and currently works on the editorial team at Peepal Tree.

Mark McWatt is the recently retired Professor of West Indian literature at UWI, Cave Hill. He is joint editor of the Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse(2005).

Source: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/home.asp

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May 22, 2011

New Book: Una Marson: Selected Poems

Una Marson: Selected Poems

Una Marson is widely recognised as ‘the earliest female poet of significance to emerge in West Indian literature’, but whilst her role as an early feminist and a ‘first woman’ publisher, broadcaster, pan-Africanist and anti-racist features on many web pages, her poetry has received less considered critical attention.

This may be because her work is very diverse, even seemingly contradictory. She is a Jamaican poet who pioneered the articulation of gender and racial oppression, brought Jamaican vernacular voices alongside a Wordsworthian passion for nature, and ventured to give subjectivity to the powerless and marginalised. Author of Afro-blues that draw on both African-American and Jamaican speech, and of folk monologues, she also wrote devotional sonnets and love lyrics within a distinctly un-modernist tradition. Marson’s work as presented here is a complex subject, striving to answer the questions of how to write as a woman; as a black, modern, diasporic subject; for the poor and powerless.

As Donnell’s extensive selection shows, and her introduction argues, Marson’s is a significant poetic achievement.

About Una Marson

Una Marson was born in Jamaica in 1905, the daughter of a Baptist minister. She worked as the assistant editor of a Jamaican political journal and in 1928 launched her own magazine, The Cosmopolitan, which dealt with local, feminist and workers’ rights issues, aimed at a progressive middle class audience. In 1930 she self-published her first collection of poems, Tropic Reveries, followed by Heights and Depths (1931), and her first play, At What Price.

Between 1932-36, Marson went to England, and her poetry was marked by her confrontation with racism, and her feminism was deepened by the International Alliance of Women. Returning to Jamaica she worked as a journalist and wrote two further plays and a third collection of poetry. She went to London between 1938-1945, where her most important work with the BBC led to the creation of the hugely influential Caribbean Voices programme. She also became involved with the pan-Africanist anti-colonial movement in this period.

Her life after 1945 is far from clear, but involved time in both Jamaica and the USA. In Jamaica she was one of the early defenders of the Rastafarian movement from persecution.

Source: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/home.asp

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May 21, 2011

New Book: The Scent of the Past and Other Stories by Wayne Brown

The Scent of the Past and Other Stories

If one wanted to find out what Trinidad and the Caribbean have been like in the last decades of the 20th century, there would be no better place to look than the stories in this collection. Whilst many of the writers of his generation reconstructed the Caribbean world from distance and memory, publishing primarily for a metropolitan audience, Brown’s stories began as publications in his weekly newspaper column with a very substantial popular audience. But there is nothing ephemeral about this work, because Brown invested these pieces with all a major poet’s delight in the power of language and with a craftsman’s meticulous concern for their structure as short stories. Frequently, the line between fiction and actuality is deliberately blurred as Brown invokes the shaping light of memory to resurrect the people and places he had known or loved (or merely imagined). Wayne Brown is no less a character in these fictions than Philip Roth and his various avatars are in his novels. What the reader encounters in the collection is Brown’s striking ability to portray people and tell stories that are particular and unique, but which cohere to form an unrivalled portrait of a rapidly changing society.

Best known as one of the Caribbean’s most incisive commentators, Wayne Brown raised a weekly newspaper column to a literary art. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column “In Our Time” appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers.

About Wayne Brown

Born in Trinidad in 1944, Wayne Brown read English at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and lived mainly between the two countries until his death in 2009. His books include On The Coast (Andre Deutsch, 1973) which was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Poetry, and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation; Edna Manley: The Private Years (Andre Deutsch, 1976), a biography of the Jamaican sculptress; a second volume of poems, Voyages (Inprint Caribbean, 1989); and The Child of the Sea (Inprint Caribbean, 1990), like his later Landscape with Heron (Observer Literary Books, 2000), a collection of short stories and remembrances. He edited Derek Walcott: Selected Poetry (Heinemann Caribbean, 1981) and edited and produced several anthologies of Jamaican fiction and poetry.

Wayne Brown was a Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, England, a Fulbright Scholar in the US, and a Fellow of Yaddo, MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lectured in English Literature in the US and at both the Trinidadian and Jamaican campuses of the University of the West Indies. Between 1984 and 2009, some 3,500 editions of his column “In Our Time” appeared in Trinidadian and Jamaican newspapers; and between February and November 2008 he wrote a weekly column, “The Race for the White House”, which appeared in the Sunday editions of the Trinidad Express, the Nation (Barbados) and the Stabroek News (Guyana). For six months in 2009 he wrote a column called “In the Obama Era”, before returning to his original, wide-ranging column, “In Our Time”.

Wayne Brown was editor of the literary pages of the Sunday Observer and the Sunday Gleaner and was the founder-tutor of The Creative Writing Workshop. He also tutored in Creative Writing (fiction, non-fiction and poetry) in the Low-residency MFA Creative Writing program of Lesley University, MA; taught Creative Writing (Poetry) at the UWI, Mona; and taught an online creative writing course for Stanford University. His two daughters, Mariel and Saffrey, live in Trinidad and Jamaica respectively.

Image: http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/23-september-2010/holding-the-strain/

Source: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/home.asp

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May 20, 2011

"Luck" by Shara McCallum

Luck

Somewhere a woman with my face
sits alone in a kitchen,

leading my other life, the one
I exchanged when I entered a room

never meant for me.
Copper light saturates the window.

I sit drinking tea and you enter,
carrying spring in your arms:

bouquet of fire lilies, purple bells, white stars.
Your skin browned from sun.

A thief, I snatched this world
from my other’s gaze—

round, expectant as the empty cup
in which she still swirls her spoon.

"Luck" by Shara McCallum. This Strange Land. Alice James Books, 2011

About Shara McCallum

Source: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/438

Image: http://www.bucknell.edu/x3695.xml

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May 18, 2011

The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World

Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, photograp...

Image via Wikipedia

SOUTH FLORIDA - Jamaica Awareness with South Florida's Caribbean American community will host a Caribbean-American Heritage month symposium that examines “The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World”.

Half-a-century ago, the Rastafari Movement in Jamaica was brought to the attention of a larger part of the still-hostile Jamaican and world community – a citizenry which had developed a fearful attitude largely based on ignorance about the phenomenon and its adherents – by the publication of a report on the movement by three professors from the University of the West Indies.

The view of the “Rastas” that was made possible through the “Report on The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica” was a view facilitated by the Jamaican Government of the time, who – in response to a request by “some prominent members of the Rastafari brethren” – asked the UWI to do the necessary research. The three young professors who carried out the interviews with the “Bredrin” and “Sistren” of the movement were Prof. M. G. Smith, Prof. Roy Augier, and Prof. Rex Nettleford.

Today, of the three authors of the 1960 report, only one is still alive – Prof. Roy Augier – and while the Rastafari Movement and its culture have remained alive, and while they have grown dramatically and spread all over the world, the questions around how they actually survived and spread; what the movement “really is”; and what its real impact has been in Jamaica and worldwide, have also remained and, in fact, the questioning has grown along with the movement.

To examine these questions, as part of South Florida’s celebration of Caribbean-American Heritage Month 2011, and a Special Tribute to Prof. Ralston “Rex” Nettleford O.M., Jamaica Awareness, Inc. presents a symposium on “The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World” at Nova Southeastern University, on Friday, June 10, starting at 6:00 PM, in the Morris Auditorium, Health Professions Division, Assembly Building, 1st Floor, 3200 South University Dr., Ft. Lauderdale.

While the common and easily-accessed colors, symbols and attire, and especially the heavily Rasta-influenced Reggae music, and even what is categorized as a “new religion” – to the consternation of many highly-spiritual Rastafarians – provide ready evidence of the overt impact of this African-rooted cultural phenomenon, there are deeper aspects and their challenges which are beyond those that the general public realizes.

It is some of these deeper, and often more nuanced, resonances that emanate from the hidden core of the Rastafari, as well as many of the more recognized repercussions from this worldwide phenomenon that the panel discussion will examine, following a keynote address from Prof. Roy Augier, surviving author of the 1960 Report.

Panelists who will bring their various “raspectives” are: Nana Farika Berhane, journalist, teacher, RasTafari Queen Mother; Mama Iyaddis, multi-media producer, community activist; Prof. Michael Barnett, Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work; Dr. K’admawe K’nIfe, Lecturer, Department of Management Studies, UWI; Dr. Jahlani Bongo Niah, Lecturer, Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI; Robin “Bongo Jerry” Small, Historian, radio host, commentator, and social activist. Ras Don Rico Ricketts will moderate the reasoning.

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May 17, 2011

Ishion Hutchinson Wins Academy of American Poets' Larry Levis Prize

Ishion Hutchinson has won the Academy of American Poets' Larry Levis Prize. Here is a poem from his debut collection, Far District.

ERRANT

Eyesight good for the devil, his kingdom
made out of insects’ parts in a dim room,
a curtain hitched in the window like a tombstone.
Woodworms tick shovels in the crossbeams;
coal-written signs hieroglyphed the wall; the town’s
one necromancer shuffles up and mutters
what his hand touches: a lethal science.
Outside, the house has other warnings: a ram’s
skin, its skull and horns nailed to the doorway.
Vine-choked veranda, root-split steps cut off
by a cesspool – alive and dead in it –
cricket balls and our eyes peering at this dark fortress.
This time I am to fetch it, the last leather
ball to fly over the fence like a black butterfly;
and at that age, oblivion matters, so one boy
at a time is sacrificed. The evening too early
to declare “bad light”, I push my head between
the barbwire, crossing over, laughter like goats.

"Errant" by Ishion Hutchinson. Far District, Peepal Tree Press, 2010.

Far District explores a journey between worlds: the familiar culture of the rural village, which the poet-speaker feels ambivalent towards, and the world of western learning, the “luminous sea of myth” that the writer has felt shut out of because of physical and intellectual poverty. As the poet’s journey takes him away from home and into the world of books and learning, there comes a new vision of what “home” might offer – a vision that can be represented through memory and the literary imagination.

"In this vivid and affecting first book, Ishion Hutchinson gives us a world in which “everything was about spirits,” where a drowned husband sitting in a “spotted tree… ‘telling me when the mangoes going to fall’” is less strange than a father arriving from a distant country on an airplane. Here, “the moon ownself” is just another local character, like the woodcutter for whom “Is evil how coal burn from black/ to red and the pot of water/ hissing like the wife.” Each description, each character becomes indelible, from the librarian with “hardboiled eyes” who will eventually set fire to the modest library “smacked between the barracks and the rum bars.” to “the ruddy-bellied woman” who “bathes/ at the public stand-pipe” until “clean and black, she shines/ like a new tyre tube.”~Jacqueline Osherow

"Far District is a marvellous book of generous, giving poems. Not only does this collection travel through an abiding language and far-reaching imagery, but it also transports the reader to a complex psychological terrain through a basic honesty and truthfulness. The leap-frogging of borders is executed with an ease that never fails to engage the reader’s mind and body. There’s a playfulness here that’s contagious and, at times, even outrageous in its breathless insinuation through a biting clarity and directness that would have challenged The Great Sparrow. Hutchinson is a young poet who seems to journey wherever his poems take him, and the reader is blessed to accompany him.~Yusef Komunyakaa

About Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson received his MFA in Poetry from New York University. His work has appeared in the LA Review, Callaloo, Caribbean Review of Books, Poetry International and the chapbook, Bryan’s Bay.

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Anancy Festival: June 11, 2011

Ft. Lauderdale

June 11, 2pm-6pm

Southwest Broward Regional Library,

7300 Pines Boulevard, Pembroke Pines, FL 33024

Admission: Free

· Live simulcast from the Anancy Festival in Kingston, Jamaica

· Storytelling by Geoffrey Philp and Father Easton Lee

· Short films on Anancy by Andrew Davies and Ananse Animation Project

· Dance performance and workshop by Afua Hall

· Musical performance by the Jamaica Folk Revue

· Anancy books and other Caribbean books on sale

· Sampling of Caribbean food

Kingston

June 11, 2pm-6pm

Kingston and St. Andrew Parish Library,

2 Tom Redcam Drive, Kingston 3

Admission: Free

· Live simulcast from the Anancy Festival in Pembroke Pines, Florida

· Anancy storytelling by Amina Blackwood Meeks, Adziko Simba and Kellie Magnus

· Short films on Anancy by Laura Tanna, Lukkee Chong, and Rachel Moss

· Exhibit on Jamaican spiders from the Natural History Division of the Institute of Jamaica

· Exhibit of Anancy illustrations by young Jamaican artists: Rachel Moss, Roxanne Richardson, Andre McLean and Nick Shelton

· Anancy face-painting, arts and crafts and spider snacks

· Anancy books and other Caribbean children’s books on sale

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Save the Date! June 4, 2011: Ol' Time Sinting

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May 16, 2011

New Books: West Indies Fiction & West Indies Poetry

Two Resources for West Indian Literature

West Indies Fiction: A Bibliography in Progress

By George Parfitt

A bibliography of fiction in English by West Indian writers, from the earliest works to 2005. More than 850 individual titles are listed, along with authors’ names, birthplace and publication details.

http://www.lulu.com/content/multimedia/west-indies-fiction-a-bibliography-in-progress/7194809

West Indies Poetry: A Bibliography in Progress

By George Parfitt

A bibliography of poetry in English by West Indian writers to 2005. More than 950 titles currently listed.

http://www.lulu.com/content/multimedia/west-indies-poetry-a-bibliography-in-progress/7194874"

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May 13, 2011

"Sunday Friends" by Cynthia James

Sunday Friends

On this ill May day trestles are laid, sausages sizzle and split

there is bread, baked beans and Quiche Lorraine

faith, hope and charity displayed;

but stick a pin -

my grief’s chaptered in the pages of the ages

anthologized, googly-fied on countless web pages,

put to bed; we’re safe

“Come sit with us,” they say, and let me listen to them talk

offer more bread, more sausage; “Eat,” they say; pressing

a doggie bag when I’m full; “Or we’ll have to throw it out.”

to them I’m either a gang-raped Rwandan, an

earthquake Haitian or a refugee Côte D’Ivoirian.

My specifics, the backseat crush of a Curepe PH- taxi

in the ripening armpit of a macomère; what’s the difference

my Monday- Wednesday-Friday friends,

work irregular hours; Sundays on Sundays off;

shifters scanning subway schedules strapped to poles:

weather watchers, PSW day and night-care givers,

an open Bible here, Asian or Arabic hieroglyphics there,

“It’s cold today!” “Did the 23 go up?”

“I just missed it; the driver saw me but he didn’t stop.”

or else silence ...

i-Pod mantras stream through womb-shaped wires

avoiding common words in this tired old experience;

a stilted ESL confounds betrayal of what

we wouldn’t know how to, or are too afraid to say;

So on this ill May Day I break bread with my Sunday friends

I pray with, sing with, laugh with, even trust enough to tell my sins;

but stick a pin -

for the Knights of Columbus have set the tables

my servers, their sisters, the charitable daughters of Isabelle:

my great- great- great- grandmother must be turning in her grave.

“Sunday Friends” by Cynthia James.

About Cynthia James:

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

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May 30, 2011

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