Voices of the Caribbean: New Poetry

Poeta y escritor nacido en Cuba en 1974. Se graduó de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa en el Instituto Superior Pedagógico de Pinar del Río. En 1997 se radica en Estados Unidos. Recibió el premio internacional de poesía Sant Jordi 2006 por Autorretrato en azul y el Paz de Poesía 2014, otorgado por The National Poetry Series, por Nueve monedas, publicado en inglés y español. Poemas, cuentos y artículos suyos han sido traducidos al inglés, alemán, turco, portugués, italiano y francés, y también han aparecido en varias antologías y revistas. Otros títulos suyos son: La seducción del Minotauro, El diablo en el cuerpo, Habitación a oscuras, Los bosques de Mortefontaine, Los nombres de la noche, El unicornio y otros poemas y Cuaderno del falso amor impuro. Carlos Pintado is a Cuban American writer, playwright, and award-winning poet who immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s. His book Autorretrato en azul received the prestigious Sant Jordi International Prize for Poetry, and his book El azar y los tesoros was a finalist for Spain’s Adonais Prize in 2008. Nine Coins/Nueve monedas (Akashic Books) is his latest collection of poetry, winner of the 2015 Paz Prize for Poetry, presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College. This annual award—named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet, Octavio Paz—honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.. Nine Coins/Nueve monedas is a palimpsest of love, fears, dreams, and the intimate landscapes where the author seeks refuge. These poems appear like small islands of salvation, covered with the brief splendor of the coins people sometimes grab hold of, taking the form of a very personal and often devastating map. Each poem is a song at the edge of an abyss; an illusory gold coin obtained as a revelation; a song of hope and understanding. The volume’s dreamlike geography prompts the reader to revisit the thread, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur’s legends. The night streets of South Beach, Alexandria, and many other cities, lit by the fading torches, seem to guide us in conversation with characters who are long dead.

Colin Channer was born in Jamaica to a pharmacist and cop. Junot Díaz calls him "one of the Caribbean Diaspora's finest writers." His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, The Common, and Renaissance Noire, among other places. His many books of prose include the novella The Girl with the Golden Shoes, "a very moving and mesmerizing journey" in the words of Edwidge Danticat. Channer’s debut poetry collection, Providential (Akashic Books), draws on his knowledge of Jamaican culture, on his complex relationship with his father and frames these poems within the constantly humane principles of Rasta and reggae.

Nicholas Laughlin is the editor of the literary journal the Caribbean Review of Books and the culture and travel magazine Caribbean Beat. He is the program director of the Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival, and a co-director of Alice Yard, a nonprofit contemporary art space in Port of Spain. The Strange Years of My Life (Peepal Tree Press) is his latest collection of poetry. Despite the book’s title, these poems are rarely autobiographical and have few straightforward stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences, and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging towards a sense of the world’s curious strangeness, the complications of what we call history, the contretemps of geography. For these poems, every sentence is a kind of translation, and language is a series of riddles with no solutions, subtly humorous at one phrase, sinister at another, heartbroken at the next.

Vladimir Lucien graduated with honors with a degree in literatures in English and theater arts from the University of the West Indies–Trinidad and is currently pursuing a master of philosophy in cultural studies at the University of the West Indies–St. Augustine. Lucien’s collection of poetry Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press) is winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. These poems contain stories of ancestors, immediate family, the history embedded in his language choices as a St Lucian writer, and heroes such as Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Kamau Brathwaite, and a local steelbandsman. This is a collection that is alive with its conscious tensions both in subject matter and form. There’s a tension between the vision of ancestors, family, and of the poet himself as being engaged in the business of acting in the world and building on the past, and a sharp awareness of the inescapability of age’s frailty, the decay of memory and of death. In the music of the poems themselves, there’s an enlivening counterpoint between the natural rhythms of spoken Creole and the metric organization of the line and its patterns of sound.