The latest issue of ZING, the LIAT in-flight magazine, runs a wonderful review with Esther Phillips, the Bajan poet laureate. She lists her five favourite poetry collections. You read the whole interview at the ZING website.
The 2018 National Poetry Competition is now open for entries! This year's illustrious panel of judges are Kei Miller, Kim Moore and Mark Waldron, who will read all poems and in the depths of next Winter determine the next winner, who will receive £5,000 and instant poetry fame.
The deadline is 31 October 2018.
The Poetry Society's anthology Thinking Outside the Penalty Box: Poetry inspired by African footballers in Britain (2018) can be read online. In the anthology you can read poems from the Young Poets Network challenge winners and commissioned poems by Nick Makoha, Roger Robinson, Sugar J and Kayo Chingonyi.
Last month Shara McCallum was on an internet radio programme called La Maja Desnuda. The show has been on the air for three decades and features recordings of poets reading their poems in Spanish and English. The programme is out of Venezuela, Spain, and Germany.
Five poems from Madwoman were translated into Spanish for the show and the author recorded them in both languages.
Jacqueline Crooks has written about the Windrush generation and moving to the UK from Jamaica in the 1960s. She speaks candidly about the betrayal felt by many of the Windrush generation, but also says:
by Kevin Le Gendre
About eight or nine years ago Kadija George asked me to chair a discussion on Black British music as part of a series of events, Black British Perspectives in the Arts. Participants included Kwame Kwaten and Sheila Chandra, two talented musicians and producers, and the session was inspiring. We talked mostly about artists who were active between the ‘60s and ‘90s. All of which whetted my appetite to go further back in time in order to retrace the fearless footsteps of their numerous predecessors.
Matthew L. Miller PhD is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken, and a former student of Kwame Dawes. Dr Miller teaches a course every summer on Caribbean Literature. He creates YouTube videos to teach the novels on his course, including two Peepal Tree Press books from the Caribbean Modern Classics series.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes was the keynote speaker at the Bare Lit Festival 2018 giving the address at The Albany, London UK on May 27, 2018. James Murua's Literary Blog shares the text in full courtesy of the speaker.
In the first of a two-parter, Jacqueline Bishop has interviewed Puerto Rican poet Loretta Collins Klobah for the Bookends section of the Jamaica Observer.
Loretta talks about her collection Ricantations, and how Hurricane Maria inspired the title poem. She also discusses the situation for people still affected by the disaster:
Jacqueline Crooks has compiled a playlist for her latest collection, The Ice Migration.
