Jacqueline Bishop

Jacqueline Bishop was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, before coming to the United States to attend college -- and to be reunited with her mother. She is the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters and is presently editing a film on a group of Jamaican untutored artists called The Intuitives. She has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Macomere, Renaissance Noire and Wasafiri amongst other journals. She lives and works in New York City ... the 15th parish of Jamaica. The River's Song is her first novel. She is also the author of Fauna a collection of poems.


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JACQUELINE BISHOP was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her parents separated early in her life, and she lived for many years with her mother and (then three) siblings, but lived with her father for several years when her mother migrated to the United States. She grew up in the capital city of Kingston, but as a child spent her summer holidays in the small district of Nonsuch, deep in the mountains of Portland. In Nonsuch she moved easily among the homes of her (maternal) great grandparents, her grand parents and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins. Nonsuch, at that time, was a place of 'no electricity' and she passed many remarkable evenings on the verandah of her great grandparents home, listening to the stories and folk legends of Jamaica, a prominent feature of her creative work.

Shortly after completing Holy Childhood High School, Ms. Bishop joined her mother in the United States to begin college. She attended Lehman College, City University of New York, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. As a junior at Lehman College, she spent a summer studying French in Montréal, Canada, at Concordia University; and a year living in Paris, France and attending the L’Université de Paris. Although she had always written creatively for several years, and had her first works published very early in her life, it was in France, a 'reading culture', that she started to harbor the thought of becoming a writer.

In 1996 Ms. Bishop obtained a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship to the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute at the University of Miami, where she studied poetry with Lorna Goodison. That fall, she started a Master’s Degree in poetry writing at New York University, studying with, among others, the poets Sharon Olds, who served as her thesis advisor; Deborah Digges and the late William Matthews. In 1997 she received five creative writing awards (Cash award of $5000), from the Cultural Development Commission in Kingston, Jamaica, for fiction and poetry writing. She subsequently won three additional creative writing awards (cash award of $3000) in 1998. She obtained her (first) Master’s Degree in 1998. Her first collection of poems, Fauna, was published by Peepal Tree Press in London in July 2006.

In 1997 Ms. Bishop also received a scholarship to the Oral History Summer Program at Columbia University and, in 1998, an Oral History Association Conference Fellowship to New Orleans, Louisiana, for her oral histories on Jamaican women living in New York City. In 1998 she presented a paper on the oral histories she collected at the Conference of Caribbean Professionals and Scholars at Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn, New York and again in 1999 at the Oral History Association Conference in Buffalo, New York. These oral histories were published by Africa World Press in June 2006 as, My Mother Who Is Me: Lifestories from Jamaican Women in New York.

Ms. Bishop was accepted back into the Creative Writing program at NYU to pursue a (second) Master’s of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing, which she received in September, 2000. She studied fiction with, among others, Paule Marshall, André Aciman, Mary Gaitskill and Irini Spanidou. She published several short stories in various publications; and her thesis, a novel, The River’s Song, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press (London) in February 2007.

While still a graduate student at NYU, Jacqueline founded, and is presently the editor for, the literary magazine, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, which publishes creative and critical writing on and from the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch-speaking Caribbean. She subsequently started production on the non-fiction film, I Came Here By A Dream: The Jamaican Intuitive Artists. Her film deals with the culture wars generated around a group of 'naïve' Jamaican artists called the 'Intuitives' and was funded in part by a grant from The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU, with additional financial support from Air Jamaica, and the writer E.L. Doctorow. For this work, she received several fellowships at NYU, culminating in the Arthur Schomburg Award for Excellence in the Humanities which was awarded to her in 2000.

Ms. Bishop has had fiction, poetry, essays and interviews, published in several magazines, including, Callalloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Wasafiri, Die Aussensites Des Elementes, Fairchild Publications, The Caribbean Writer, Unfold Magazine, MACO: Caribbean Living, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters; and her work is to be part of a multimedia CD-ROM on the history and development of Jamaican poetry. For several years she taught literature at Medgar Evers College, was Writer-in-Residence at Teachers and Writers Collaborative, and has taught creative writing at The Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, and served as a facilitator for Women in Literature and Letters, a collective devoted to social change and action by women through the written word. Presently, she teaches writing at New York University. She lives in New York City.

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