Authors
Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, the young girl experienced the profound effects of racial discrimination and brutality and used the experience to launch her career. Her connection to the Caribbean comes from her Trinidadian grandfather and a strong footprint in pre-civil rights Harlem. She became a member of the Harlem Writers Guild which had strong Caribbean representation in the 50s. She’s been moved by the writings of people of Caribbean descent like James Weldon Johnson and has rubbed shoulders with other Caribbean Diaspora figures like Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy and Louise Bennett well renowned language revisionist of Jamaica, Stokely Carmicheal and Malcolm X among others. She has performed for presidents. Her extensive body of poetry and prose has been translated into several languages.
Paule Marshall was born in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents. In 1983 the New York Book Review published an article of Marshall’s in 1983 she toasts the speechifying of the Caribbean women in her mother’s kitchen as foundation for writing. From these women, James Weldon Johnson and other writers she admired, she began to learn the art of expression. Among her long list of writings are, Soul Clap Hands and Sing, Brown Girl Brown Stones and The Fisher King. She has taught many in the classrooms of Yale University and Virginia Commonwealth, classroom and her books are required reading for thousands of students.
Merle Collins, poet, novelist and teacher was raised on the island of Grenada. She earned her doctoral degree in government from the University of London. She is now a professor of Creative Writing, Literature and Caribbean Studies at the University of Maryland. Her focus has been politics and society and the links between literature and politics. The Grenada revolution was a cyclical event which informed her writings on political freedom. Her work been published in several anthologies. She has written short and long fiction and performs her poetry in theatre. Her publications include two novels, Angel and The Colour of Forgetting, a collection of short stories and several collections of poetry. Her current project is “In the Footsteps of the Old Heads: Saraka and Nation in the Caribbean." Merle Collins won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003.
Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica one of nine children – a family of writers. Her career has run the gamut: art teacher, public relations executive, poet and memoirist. Her considerable body of work includes eleven volumes of poetry among them Tamarind Season and Baby Mother and the King of Swords. She has written short and long narratives, her most recent being a 2008 novel From Harvey River. She is winner of the Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Goodison has wide appeal, her work being the subject of study in numerous literary critiques and her poems have been included in many collections including the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Currently she is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and enjoys a robust schedule of performances and readings worldwide.