Caribbean Writers: Race, Gender and Representation

Candice Carty-Williams is a senior marketing executive at Vintage. In 2016, she created and launched the Guardian and 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, which aims to find, champion, and celebrate underrepresented writers. She contributes regularly to i-D, Refinery29, BEAT Magazine, and more, and her pieces, especially those about blackness, sex, and identity, have been shared globally. Queenie (Queenie Gallery/Scout Press) is her first novel. Jojo Moyes calls it,“[B]rilliant, timely, funny, heartbreaking.” Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle-class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Death, ; Claire of the Sea Light, Brother, I'm Dying, The Dew Breaker, The Farming of Bones, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Krik? Krak! A 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature winner and the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," she has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and elsewhere. Her most recent book Everything Inside (Akashic Books) is a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Danticat’s latest children’s book, My Mommy Medicine (Roaring Brook Press) is a picture book about the comfort and love a mama offers when her child isn't feeling well. She is also is a contributing writer in in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic Books), an anthology edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a visiting assistant professor in the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work appears in Rolling Stone, the Guardian, the Fader, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Best American Essays, and other publications. Author Julia Alvarez writes of her debut memoir, “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls (Algonquin Books) than some lives hold in a lifetime.” Ordinary Girls is a fierce, beautiful, and unflinching memoir from a wildly talented debut author. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Jaquira Díaz found herself caught between extremes: as her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was surrounded by the love of her friends; as she longed for a family and home, she found instead a life upended by violence. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz triumphantly maps a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be.

Kevin Adonis Browne is a photographer, poet, archivist, and scholar of contemporary rhetoric and Caribbean culture. His previous books include Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean. He is currently based in Trinidad, where he works at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. His latest book High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (University Press of Mississippi) was Overall Winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Taking a sophisticated and unapologetically subjective Caribbean point of view, the author delves into Mas―a key feature of Trinidad performance―as an emancipatory practice. The photographs and essays here immerse the viewer in carnival experience as never before. Kevin Adonis Browne divulges how performers are or wish to be perceived, along with how, as the photographer, he is implicated in that dynamic. The resulting interplay encourages an informed, nuanced approach to the imaging of contemporary Caribbeanness. Representing the uneasy embrace of tradition in Trinidad and the Caribbean at large, the book probes the multiple dimensions of vernacular experience and their complementary cultural expressions. For Browne, Mas performance is an exquisite refusal to fully submit to the lingering traumas of slavery, the tyrannies of colonialism, and the myths of independence.

M.J. Fievre is a Haitian-American poet who lives in Miami and writes in English and French. She’s been described by Edwidge Danticat as “a prodigious talent.” She earned her MFA at Florida International University and is author of a memoir A Sky the Color of Chaos. M.J. is also Program Coordinator for ReadCaribbean at the Miami Book Fair. Her latest book Happy, Okay?: Poems about Anxiety, Depression, Hope, and Survival (Books & Books Press) is an exhilarating exploration of depression, anxiety, grief, and loss. Paloma is faking it. On the outside, she’s A-Okay: she’s electrified at work; there is a cadence in her step as she walks her dog; she posts memes on Facebook; and she keeps up with most relationships. Looks can be deceiving, however: Inside, Paloma is just going through the motions, and she feels like things are spiraling out of control. But when things are at their darkest, dawn arrives with clarity and focus, and with it, healing. Paloma learns to value small glimmering moments of joy rather than searching for constant happiness, thus building hope for her future. A manifesto for life. The poems in this book address the emotional contradictions of depression, anxiety, grief and loss, guiding the reader down a path to healing, fortitude, and life-sustaining joy.