Sharlan Bailey
Sharlan Bailey is a musician, composer/songwriter, producer, and performer who has been gracing the stage professionally since 2003 as a solo act. Sharlan is a descendant of calypso royalty, being the younger son of deceased Dr. Winston “The Shadow” Bailey. Sharlan’s early exposure to the stage began as a back-ground singer providing chorus and writing […]
Heather Cateau
Dr. Heather Cateau specialises in the study of plantation systems and in comparative systems of enslavement. She teaches courses in the areas of Caribbean history, economic history, and Caribbean historiography. She is working on “Voices of the Past,” a novel oral history project which seeks to capture historical experiences before they are lost. She has […]
Hon. Mr. Justice Adrian Saunders
Hon. Mr. Justice Adrian Saunders, a native of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill) in 1975 and a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad & Tobago in 1977. He began his legal career as a barrister […]
Nick Makoha
Nick Makoha is a London-based Ugandan poet and playwright and founder of Obsidian. Winner of the Ivan Juritz Prize 2021, his debut Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and nominated by The Guardian as one of the best books of 2017. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni, he […]
Luke Neima
Luke Neima is the online editor and digital director of Granta magazine, where he commissions long-form reportage, memoir and fiction for Granta.com as well as for the print magazine. His reviewing, fiction and translations have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Prospect Magazine and the White Review. He is also the writer of the documentary […]
Caryl Phillips
Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction. A recipient of a 2013 Anthony Sabga Award for Caribbean Excellence, his awards include the PEN Open Book Award, the Commonwealth Literature Prize, the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black […]
Dwight Thompson
Dwight Thompson is a Jamaican working in Japan as an English teacher. His work has appeared in the Montego Bay Western Mirror and Caribbean Writer, where he won the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize. One of his stories was also short-listed for a prize in the 2012 Small Axe Literary Competition. Death Register is his […]
Yuri Herrera
Yuri Herrera (Actopan, México, 1970) has written three novels, all of them translated into several languages: Kingdom Cons, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and Transmigration of Bodies; which have been published in English by And Other Stories. In 2016 he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best Translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding […]
Selwyn R. Cudjoe
Selwyn R. Cudjoe is a professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, Massachusetts. He attended Fordham, Columbia and Cornell universities. He has taught at Fordham, Cornell, Ohio and Harvard universities. He has also written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the New Left Review and the Trinidad Express where he is a weekly […]
Ian Randle
Ian Randle, O.D., B.A. (Hons); MSc, LL.D. (Hon), recipient of the 2019 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award, is Chairman of Ian Randle Publishers Limited, which he founded in 1990, now recognized regionally and internationally as one of the leading publishers of books on and about the Caribbean. Ian Randle has over 45 years experience as a […]
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a National Book Award Finalist. Their previous poetry collection [insert] Boy (2014) won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Diana Evans
Diana Evans is an award-winning British author of Nigerian and English descent. She has written three novels, the most recent of which, Ordinary People, was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in fiction. Her first novel, 26a, won the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers. She lives in London.
Luke Daniels
Luke Daniels is a social activist, counsellor and consultant on domestic violence, who was born in Guyana, is UK-based and has worked internationally. His book Pulling the Punches: Defeating Domestic Violence (2014) was the first self-help guide for perpetrators, and his 2018 book, Defeating Domestic Violence in the Americas – Men’s Work, charts the region’s history of violence, […]
Margaret Busby
Margaret Busby CBE, Hon. FRSL, editor, broadcaster and writer, was born in Ghana and educated in the UK. She became Britain’s youngest and first black woman publisher when in 1967 she co-founded Allison & Busby, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She edited the pioneering anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and 2019’s follow-up, […]
Krystal A. Sital
Born in the republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Krystal A. Sital is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Secrets We Kept: Three Women of Trinidad. A PEN award finalist, her work has appeared in Elle Magazine, The New York Times, Salon, Today’s Parent, Catapult, The Caribbean Writer, and elsewhere.
Alexia Arthurs
Alexia Arthurs was born and raised in Jamaica and moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was twelve. A graduate of Hunter College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been published in Granta, The Sewanee Review, Small Axe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vice, Shondaland, Buzzfeed, and The Paris Review, which awarded her the Plimpton Prize in 2017. How […]
Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin’s most recent book is The World After Rain: Anne’s Poem, winner of the 2026 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry. Her previous books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Lubrin’s work has been recognized with the Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Writer’s […]
Kendel Hippolyte
Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, playwright, director and sporadic researcher into Caribbean arts and culture. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies regionally and internationally. He has taught poetry workshops in various countries and performed at literary events within the Caribbean and beyond. His book, Fault Lines, won the OCM Bocas Prize for […]
Claire Adam
Her debut, multi prize-winning novel Golden Child (Faber & Faber) was published in 2019 and translated into several languages. It was a Times and Evening Standard ‘Book of the Year’, one of the BBC’s ‘100 novels that shaped our world’, featured on Radio 4’s ‘Book at Bedtime’, and winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize, the […]
Ivette Romero
Ivette Romero (PhD French Literature, Cornell University) is professor of Spanish at Marist College. Her interests include comparative Caribbean literature, gender and visual arts. Her published work includes journal articles, book chapters, and the co-edited volumes Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures […]
Gary Younge
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and columnist for The Guardian, based in London. He also writes a monthly column, Beneath the Radar, for the Nation magazine and is the Alfred Knobler Fellow for The Nation Institute. He has written five books: Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives; The […]
Schuyler Esprit
Schuyler Esprit has research and teaching experience in Caribbean literary and cultural studies, academic and professional writing, digital humanities, educational technology and higher education administration. She is the founder of Create Caribbean Research Institute, a non-profit educational institute based in Dominica that bridges academic excellence, technology empowerment and civic engagement to help young people build […]
Jane Bryce
Jane Bryce, Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, is chair of fiction judges for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She has published cultural and literary criticism in a range of academic journals and essay collections, specializing in African and Caribbean popular and […]
Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, USVI, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, longlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem; Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award […]
Geoffrey Philp
Geoffrey Philp has written two novels, Benjamin, My Son and Garvey’s Ghost; five poetry collections, Exodus and Other Poems, Florida Bound, Hurricane Center, Xango Music, and Dub Wise; two collections of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien and Who’s Your Daddy?, and three children’s books, Marcus and the Amazons, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories, and The Christmas Dutch Pot Baby. His work is represented in nearly every anthology of Caribbean literature, and […]
Marina Warner
Writer of fiction, cultural history, and criticism Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, cultural history, and criticism. Her grandfather the cricketer Plum Warner was born and brought up in Port of Spain. Her novels include Indigo (1994) a revisioning of The Tempest, and The Leto Bundle (2000) a mythological sequence about a woman refugee. […]
Marcus Millette
Marcus Millette is a writer, spoken word poet and teaching artiste. He is a two time national poetry slam finalist. His diverse personality encourages valiant voice in his work. Millette’s unique outlook on life comes as a result of his hometown where he was always greeted with the harsh realities of life. Marcus believes his […]
Jeannine Remy
Dr. Jeannine Remy, a 2000 Fulbright fellow, lectures in music in the Department for Creative and Festival Arts, UWI, St. Augustine and is the co-author of Steelpan in Education: A History of the Northern Illinois University Steelband. As a steelpan arranger, performer and pan historian she has researched and aided the archiving of T&T’s steelpan […]
Rudolph Ottley
Rudolph Ottley is Assistant Professor at the Academy of the Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at the University of Trinidad and Tobago. Ambataila Women: The Untold Story in Calypso from Chanterelle to Calypsonian 1838-2014 is his latest publication about T&T’s musical history.
Johan Chuckaree
Johan Chuckaree started playing pan aged 4, becoming a staple frontline player for the iconic Phase II Pan Groove led by Len Boogsie Sharpe and an international pan ambassador. In 2013 he co-founded the Indigisounds Steelpan Sample Library to promote pan internationally on digital platforms.