Coming Up Hot: 8 new poets from the Caribbean
Here is an opportunity to discover some of the best new, unpublished poets from the Caribbean. Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, an imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, and as part of CaribLit project.
Price
£8.99
Author(s)
Kwame Dawes
Danielle Boodoo-Fortune
Danielle Jennings
Ruel Johnson
Monica Minott
Debra Providence
Shivanee Ramlochan
Colin Robinson
Sassy Ross
ISBN number
9781845233099
Pages
214
Price
£8.99
Classification
Anthologies
Poetry
Country setting
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago
Guyana
St Lucia
St Vincent
Pan Caribbean
Publication date
10 Aug 2015

With a generous sample from each poet, there are new writers from Jamaica, Trinidad, St Lucia, St Vincent and Guyana. Meet Danielle Boodoo-Fortune and her richly gothic take on love and its complications; Danielle Jennings’ exuberant narratives of family history and the struggles for respect between men and women; Ruel Johnson’s often witty attempts to confront the insanity of contemporary Guyana’s race wars and political corruption through the formal coolness of poetry; Monica Minott’s frank celebrations of women’s sexuality and her attempt to re-enter the world of spirit possession and trance; Debra Providence’s spare womanist reflections that pack a more devastating punch by saying more with less; Shivanee Ramlochan’s confidently experimental poems that explore the threatening uncertainties of the present through the imagery of speculative fictions set in some post-disaster world; Colin Robinson’s polyphonic, modernist reflections on the queer Caribbean and its joys and sorrows; and Sassy Ross’s tightly structured explorations of memory between the here and there of St Lucia and New York. 

Here is a generation that has absorbed Walcott, Brathwaite, Carter and Lorna Goodison, but has found its own distinctive voices, themes and formal models. Each of the contributors is well on the way to having their own first collections.

Coming Up Hot is the second publication of Peekash Press, a joint imprint of Akashic Books and Peepal Tree Press committed to supporting the emergence of new Caribbean writing, as part of CaribLit project.

Variations

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He is Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner and George W. Holmes University Professor at the University of Nebraska. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry.
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Danielle Boodoo-Fortune

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a Trinidadian poet and artist. She is the winner of the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the Hollick-Arvon Prize. Her writing and art have appeared in publications such as Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, the Caribbean Writer, Small Axe Literary Salon, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Dirtcakes Journal, Room Magazine and others. She was awarded the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize by the Caribbean Writer in 2009, and in 2013 featured in the Bocas New Talent Showcase, was shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the Montreal Poetry Prize, and won the the Small Axe Literary competition.
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Danielle Jennings

Danielle Jennings was born in Saint Andrew, Jamaica in 1983. A graduate of the University of the West Indies, where she majored in English, she has taught in high school, worked for her church and is currently employed as a paralegal. Danielle has been writing creatively since 2005. Her poem “Mango Time” was previously published in Jubilation: Poems Celebrating 50 Years of Jamaican Independence.
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Ruel Johnson

Ruel Johnson is a poet and short story writer living in Georgetown, Guyana. He has twice been the winner of the Guyana Prize, for his short story collection Ariadne and other Stories in 2002, and for Fictions in 2012. His work is largely concerned with the issues facing contemporary Guyana, including its political and ethnic divisions. He has a son, Aidan.
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Monica Minott

Winsome Monica Minott is a chartered accountant and poet. Her poetry collection Zion Roses is longlisted for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and she has received two awards in the Jamaican National Book Development Council’s annual literary competitions for book-length collections of her poetry
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Debra Providence

Debra Providence was born and raised in St. Vincent. She has published fiction and poetry in Cave Hill Literary Annual (POUI), Sable Litmag and Seen and Heard: An Anthology of Vincentian Women Writers and Artists. She is currently a lecturer in Caribbean Women’s literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.
She is inspired to write by her experiences as a young Caribbean woman with a sensitive and imaginative world view and enjoys exploring unlikely linkages of knowledge in her creative and academic work.
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Shivanee Ramlochan

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean's largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago's oldest independent Caribbean specialty bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, was published by Peepal Tree Press on October 3rd, 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Award for best first collection.
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Colin Robinson

Colin Robinson has just published his first collection of poetry. He lives in Trinidad and Tobago, to which he has returned twice, from Leeds at age 4, and Brooklyn at age 45.
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Sassy Ross

Sassy Ross received her MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she also taught undergraduate English. The former Managing Editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, her work has appeared in Poetry International, The Caribbean Review of Books, and Calabash. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, she currently resides in New York.
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