Jason Allen- Paisant | ![]() |
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet and writer whose work examines the ways in which Afro-diasporic artists and communities shape their lives through embodied, living philosophies. He’s a graduate of the University of the West Indies (Mona) and of the University of Oxford, where he earned a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages, with a dissertation on theatre from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. He is currently a professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. Jason is the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections. The first, Thinking with Trees, won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. The second, Self-Portrait as Othello, is a Poetry Book Society Choice and the winner of the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection; and the 2023 T.S. Eliot Prize. He is the author of Théâtre dialectique postcolonial, and a philosophical monograph, Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits, is published with Oxford University Press. His memoir, The Possibility of Tenderness, will be out with Hutchinson Heinemann in 2025. Jason lives in Leeds, England, with his wife and two children. |
Alison Donnell | ![]() |
Alison Donnell is Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Bristol. She has published widely in the field of Anglophone Caribbean literature, with significant contributions to the fields of literary history, recovery research of women authors, Caribbean literary archives, and creolized sexualities. She remains inspired by the ways in which Peepal Tree has sustained both the future and the past of Caribbean literature through its publishing lists and how it has supported its writers and readers. |
Richard Drayton | ![]() |
Richard Drayton is a Guyana-born historian and currently Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London. He is author of Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (Yale University Press, 2000). He was the chair of the non-fiction judges for the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize. |
Thomas Glave | ![]() |
Thomas Glave was born in the Bronx and grew up there and in Kingston, Jamaica. In Jamaica, Glave worked on issues of social justice and helped found the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG). He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Lambda Literary Award winner), The Torturer’s Wife (Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist) and Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh. He is editor of the anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Lambda Literary Award winner), and an associate editor of Wasafiri magazine. He has been Martin Luther King Jr Visiting Professor at MIT, a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick, and is currently an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool. A trustee of Writing West Midlands (UK), Glave is an editor of Transition and a 2022 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Nottingham. |
Kadish Morris | ![]() |
Kadish Morris (b.1990, Leeds) is an editor, writer, poet and arts critic at The Observer, where she previously worked as a commissioning editor. Her writing and criticism has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Frieze, Art Review, The Financial Times, Vice, Royal Academy magazine, The Bookseller, Dazed, AnOther, and TWIN. In 2020, she was awarded the Eric Gregory prize awarded to poets under 30. She previously worked at Frieze as a staff writer, writing and commissioning digital content and has also worked for Tate Etc. She founded the interview series g-irl.com, which ran from 2015-2018 (R.I.P). She has interviewed leading figures in art and culture including Kehinde Wiley, John Boyega, FKA Twigs, Hew Locke, Marina Abramović, Mykki Blanco and George The Poet. From 2021-2023, she was a judge for the Sky Arts Award. |
Nii Ayikwei Parkes | ![]() |
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a Ghanaian-British writer and editor who has won acclaim as a children's author, poet, broadcaster and novelist. Winner of multiple international awards including the ACRAG award, his novel Tail of the Blue Bird won France's two major prizes for translated fiction – Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Bataillon – in 2014. Nii Ayikwei is the founder of flipped eye publishing, a leading small press, serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize, and was chair of judges for the 2020 Commonwealth Prize. Currently Producer of Literature and Talks at Brighton Festival, he is the author of two collections of poetry The Makings of You (2010) and The Geez (2020), both published by Peepal Tree Press. |
Susan Pitter | ![]() |
Susan Pitter is a freelance cultural heritage producer with a background in partnerships and communications in the private and public sectors in the UK and Jamaica. Working mainly in the arts and cultural sector with local, national and international networks, she has brought communities, artists and organisations together resulting in events, partnerships and collaborations that would not otherwise exist. She believes in the power of authentic, compelling storytelling, whether for corporate messaging or through the narratives reflected in the artistic, heritage and cultural programmes she has produced and delivered. |