Participants Archive • Page 26 of 36 • Bocas Lit Fest

Stephen Stuempfle

Stephen Stuempfle is Executive Director of the Society for Ethnomusicology at Indiana University in Bloomington, and Adjunct Associate Professor in IU’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. He is the author of The Steelband Movement: The Forging of a National Art in Trinidad and Tobago (1995) and co-editor of Music, Memory, Resistance: Calypso and the Caribbean […]

Rudylynn De Four Roberts

Rudylynn De Four Roberts, architect and Past President and Fellow of the Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Architects, focuses on restoring historic buildings and lobbying for the preservation of national built heritage through Citizens for Conservation, The National Trust and the Queen’s Park Savannah Management Committee.

Ingrid Persaud

Ingrid Persaud’s novel Love After Love, set in Trinidad where she was born, won the 2020 Costa First Novel Award. Her new book is The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, published in 2024. She also won the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017. Her writing has […]

Savitri (Savi) Naipaul Akal

Savitri (Savi) Naipaul Akal was born in Trinidad, the fifth child and fourth daughter of Seepersad and Droapatie Naipaul, sister of Vidia and Shiva. Her family memoir The Naipauls of Nepaul Street will be published in May 2018.

Myron B

Myron B (Myron Bruce) is the 2018 Extempo Champion and a Dimanche Gras 2018 Calypso Monarch Finalist.

Celeste Mohammed

Celeste Mohammed is a Trinidadian lawyer-turned-writer. Her debut novel-in-stories Pleasantview (Jacaranda, 2021) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize, and her debut non-fiction book A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil was published in […]

Breanne McIvor

Breanne Mc Ivor was born and raised in Trinidad. She studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh before returning home. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Fish One-Page Prize and the Derek Walcott Writing Prize. In 2015, she won The Caribbean Writer’s David […]

Danielle Legros Georges

Danielle Legros Georges, Haiti-born, US author of two poetry collections, The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s 2016 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, and Maroon (2001). She is a professor at Lesley University and in 2014 was named Boston’s second poet laureate.

Corine La Font

Corine La Font is an award-winning author, speaker, publisher, consultant and online radio host who recently launched an online educational portal, The Self Publishing University dot com, to help writers self publish.

Keith Jardim

Keith Jardim is from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. His stories have appeared in many publications, and his book Near Open Water was published in 2011 by Peepal Tree Press.

Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch is a writer, broadcaster, barrister, and human rights development worker of Ghanaian, English, and Jewish heritage. She is the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News. She writes a fortnightly column for the Guardian. She is the author of Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (2018).

Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera is a Sri Lanka-born, British writer whose widely acclaimed first novel Reef was published in 1994 and short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. His most recent book, Noontide Toll, was published in 2014.

Alexander Girvan

Alexander Girvan is an environmental economist with regional and international institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the University of the West Indies to advance the inclusion of environmental factors in policy making decisions.

Joanne V. Gabbin

Joanne V. Gabbin, Professor of English, James Madison University, founded the Furious Flower Poetry Center in 1999. She is the author of Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition, editor of Furious Flower: African American Poetry From the Black Arts Movement to the Present and The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, and executive […]

Alison Donnell

Alison Donnell is Head of School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her latest research project on Caribbean Literary Heritage (2017–2020) is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and brings her critical interest in recovering neglected writers together with her commitment to safeguarding the future of the literary past.

David Chariandy

David Chariandy’s debut novel Soucouyant received nominations from eleven literary awards juries, including a Governor General’s Literary Award shortlisting, a Gold Independent Publisher Award for Best Novel, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. Brother, his second novel, won the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton is a fiction writer, born in Canada and raised in New Zealand. Her first novel, The Rehearsal, won the UK Society of Authors 2 Betty Trask Award, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker […]

Mariel Brown

Mariel Brown is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and the director of SAVANT Ltd (savantmedia.tv), a creative and production company based in Trinidad and Tobago. She has worked in television and print since 1997. Her most recent film is the feature Unfinished Sentences, about her father, the late writer Wayne Brown.

Vicki-Ann Assevero

Vicki-Ann Assevero is a senior legal counsel, consultant on transactional mediation and social entrepreneur with a longstanding interest in sustainable development. In 2012 she founded The Green Market Santa Cruz, which the UNEP recognized in 2016 as an example of integrated sustainable development in practice. A graduate of Yale College, Harvard Law School, in 2010 […]

Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012) To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins / Tin House, 2018) and All The Names Given (Picador / Tin House, 2021). In 2019 he became the […]

Sharifa Ali-Abdullah

Sharifa Ali-Abdullah is the Assistant Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme for Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten. She is an economist whose work includes key partnerships with international and regional bodies including UN Agencies, IMF, World Bank, IDB, OAS, Commonwealth Secretariat and CARICOM.

Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Times, The Nation. His first collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf was recently published by Penguin in the UK. Born in Iran, he teaches creative writing in the USA and has won the Pushcart Prize, a Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent […]

Danielle Y.C. McClean

Trinidad-born and US-based writer, translator and interpreter, Danielle Y. C. McClean is the author of the Secrets of Oscuros series. Her debut novel, Secrets of Oscuros: The Protectors’ Pledge (CaribbeanReads 2017, illustrator: Lorena Soriano), placed third in the 2016 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature, and its sequel, Secrets of Oscuros: The Whisperer’s Warning (CaribbeanReads 2022, illustrator: Rachel Moss) was the […]

Florenz Webbe Maxwell

Florenz Webbe Maxwell was born in Bermuda. She received her inspiration to write while a student at the Central School. Her poem, A Song of Central, written at age 12, was later put to music by David Knights, another student at Central and became the school’s song. In 1972, she won first place for the […]

Tamika Gibson

Tamika Gibson is the author of Dreams Beyond the Shore, winner of the 2016 CODE Burt Award for Caribbean YA Literature and one of Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of 2017. Between growing up in Trinidad and Tobago and living in the United States, Tamika has always been observing the rich stories unfolding around her. She […]

Gillian Moor

For the last two decades, Gillian has impacted the underground music scene in T&T with her unique acoustic style, creative collaborations and support for emerging performers. Her Songshine open mic series provided a platform for scores of singers, musicians and poets from 2004 to 2009. Her recent critically acclaimed Cool Nights series has continued to […]

David McDermott Hughes

David McDermott Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and the author of Energy without Consciousness: Oil, Climate Change and Complicity, as well as Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging and From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier.

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