In the wake of public discussions around sexual abuse and the value of speaking out about these experiences (#metoo), Shivanee Ramlochan writes about the inspirations behind her collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting in the T&T Guardian.
Last month we wrote an open letter of support to everyone affected by Irma and Maria. We were very pleased to receive this handwritten letter from Loretta Collins Klobah sent by courier from Puerto Rico.
We are still without electricity and water… It looks as if the entire island has been bombed. Every street has extraordinary damage and debris.
A few of the impressive sights so far:
In The Town Crier magazine, John Robert Lee talks about ekphrastic poetry and the multiple ways of perceiving and knowing in art-making.
"[...] discovery of convergences is essential to all art-making including of course, writing poetry. And what makes poetry accessible to readers from one’s own culture and those who are strangers to it, is that the writer seeks to find points of conflux, human commonalities (even across time), with which the reader can identify, even though the specific details may be unfamiliar."
Shara McCallum has penned the essay 'Metaphors of the Spirit' in Poetry London, August 2017, in which she analyses Mervyn Morris' Peelin Orange: Collected Poems (Carcanet) and Lorna Goodison's Collected Poems (Carcanet).
Monique Roffey interviews Shivanee Ramlochan for Wasafiri.
I’ve been in love with nasty women long before that term acquired currency as a trending battle cry. This is the reason Kali is the god of my household of one – no sanitised version, but Kali in her black-skinned, murderous, protectorate ire and grace. It’s my honour to write about women who bleed, fuck, dance, cuss, transact and thief without apology, be they gentle or garrotte-hearted.
Begun in 1834 and abolished in 1917, the system of indenture created Indian diasporic communities in three continents. Professor David Dabydeen, a pioneer of Indian-Caribbean studies as a discipline in the UK and a leading poet of the Indian-Caribbean experience, is co-convenor of the forthcoming Indenture Abolition Centenary conference. In his latest interview with Talking Humanities, he explains why it is important to mark the abolition of a system used to bring millions of Indians to labour on British colonial plantations in the Caribbean and beyond.
'Why do we need Black publishers if one of our societal objectives is to nurture a diverse society in Britain? Because diversity is paralleled with having options; we need gay publishers, women publishers as well as Black publishers,' writes Kadija George for the British Library.
Cosmopolitan has published an excerpt of Leone Ross' short story 'Drag' from Come Let Us Sing Anyway.
Known for melding magic realism with erotic fiction, Leone Ross’ novels and short stories are original in approach, style and voice, defying literary niches and expectations of genre. Her work incorporates elements of speculative fiction, erotica and Caribbean fiction. Read an interview with the author.
Jamaican author and journalist Alecia McKenzie has just won a second prize for her first novel, after Commonwealth accolades for her short stories.
Sweetheart (Trésor in French) has been awarded the 2017 Prix Carbet des Lycéens. It’s a literary competition, judged by French-Caribbean high school students, to highlight the best writing by authors from the entire Caribbean region.
