“Out of Many, One People”: Olive Senior, Dionne Irving & Jonathan Escoffery

Dionne Irving is the author of the novel Quint. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Missouri Review, New Delta Review, and on Literary Hub, among other print and online journals and magazines. She teaches in the creative writing program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame. In The Islands: Stories (Catapult), Irving looks at the history and condition of Jamaican women in locations and times ranging from 1950s London and 1960s Panama to modern-day New Jersey. She follows the lives of these women – immigrants or the descendants of immigrants – who chose to move to escape the ghosts of colonialism on what they call “the Island.” It’s an unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention, only to reveal the cracks in their marriage. In another, the sole Jamaican mother at a prep school feels pressure to volunteer for its International Day event. In a third, a travel writer connects with the mother who once abandoned her. Restless, displaced, and disconnected, these characters try to ground themselves and grow roots wherever they find themselves.

Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for fiction, the 2020 ASME Award for fiction, and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, Zyzzyva, and Agni, and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing 2020 and elsewhere. In his debut linked story collection, If I Survive You: Stories (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), it’s the 1970s and Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Yet even as things fall apart, the family, excluded from society as Black immigrants, remains motivated by what the couple’s younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.” Trelawny struggles to carve out a place for himself amid financial disaster, racism, and flat-out bad luck. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab to get his kids back, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father who doesn’t want to be found. If I Survive You unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness.

Olive Senior, poet laureate of Jamaica 2021–24, is the author of 20 books, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children’s literature, and other published work. She has received many awards, and her work has been adapted for radio and stage, translated into many languages, and taught internationally. Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems (Carcanet Press Ltd.) brings together Senior’s first four books of poetry alongside a new collection. She has long been recognized as a skillful and evocative storyteller, but this book shows the consistency and range of her achievement. Senior’s poems are delicate, formally playful, and always finely observed, whether responding to Jamaican birdlife, the larger natural world, or the traces of a complicated historical inheritance. Often, and always surprisingly, her poems’ brilliant descriptions and vivid, gripping narratives open out into ecological reflections, politics, and culture in original and sensuous ways.

Tanya Batson-Savage is a Jamaican writer, filmmaker, publisher, and creative consultant. She is the publisher and editor of the independent publishing house Blue Banyan Books and its imprint Blouse & Skirt Books. She wrote a collection for children, Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories (2005), produced and script-edited the animated short film Agwe (2018), and wrote the critically acclaimed play Woman Tongue (2016). Her short film script Endeavour earned the award for Best Script in the KingstOOn Anime Festival in 2013. She will appear at Miami Book Fair 2022 to moderate the panel “Out of Many, One People,” where writers with ties to Jamaica will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the island nation’s independence and read from their work.