“Caribbean Myths & Realities”: Jasmine Sealy, Opal Palmer Adisa, & Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Moko Magazine, Small Axe, POUi, Pree, Callaloo, and Anomaly. Her debut When We Were Birds: A Novel (Doubleday), is a mythic love story set in Trinidad. In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: One St. Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out. Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the beliefs his mother passed on to him to provide for them both. Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves, and a reckoning with fate beckons.

Jasmine Sealy is a Barbadian Canadian writer based in Vancouver. Her work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Adda Stories, Cosmonauts Avenue, Geist, Room, Prairie Fire, and Best Canadian Stories 2021, and she is the former prose editor at Prism international. The Island of Forgetting: A Novel (HarperAvenue) is an intimate saga spanning four generations of one family that runs a beachfront hotel in Barbados. It begins in 1962. Iapetus roams the island, scared and alone, driven mad after witnessing his father’s death at the hands of his mother and his older brother, Cronus. Just before Iapetus is lost forever, he has a son, Atlas. He knows little about the tragic circumstances of his father’s life, so he lives under the care of his uncle, Cronus. The story unfolds with Atlas’ daughter, Calypso, and then, in 2019, her son, Nautilus, who finds himself exiled to Canada after making an impulsive decision. Loosely inspired by Greek mythology, The Island of Forgetting is about the echo of deep, sometimes tragic love, and how a family’s past can haunt its future.

Haitian Canadian American writer and author Myriam J. A. Chancy, Ph.D., is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of What Storm, What Thunder (HarperCollins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake that was awarded a 2022 American Book Award (ABA) from the Before Columbus Foundation and named a best book of 2021 by NPR, Kirkus, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, The Boston Globe, Amazon Books, and Canada’s Globe and Mail. The book was also shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Caribbean Fiction; The Scorpion’s Claw; and Spirit of Haiti, which was shortlisted in the best first book category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize, 2004. Her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone, Electric Literature, Guernica, and Room.

Opal Palmer Adisa, Ph.D., is a Jamaica-born writer who has authored poetry, prose, novels, essays, and plays. She has 24 titles to her credit, including The Storyteller’s Return: Story Poems and Portia Dreams, a children’s biography of Portia Simpson Miller, Jamaica’s first female prime minister. She is also the editor of the anthology 100+ Voices for Miss Lou (The UWI Press). A gender specialist and cultural activist, Palmer Adisa has lectured and read/performed her work throughout the United States, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Germany, Spain, France, England, Prague, Italy, and Bosnia.