Marsha Gomes-McKie
Author and Illustrator. Over a decade of self-publishing experience. Owner of Aajumbee Publishing House, Founder of Caribbean Books Foundation, Regional Advisor for the Caribbean South Chapter of the Society of Children Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and Registered Writer and Artist with Artist Registry of the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts.
Mary Cuffy
Mary Cuffy is the author of the ladybug book series, Lola and the Dancing Ladybugs, Lola and the Magic Sticks, Lola and the Fascinating Cocoa Bean, and a recipe book Bake the Cocoa Cookie with Lola. She is a storyteller whose work focuses on literacy and music in early childhood and she lectures at the UWI Open Campus, in the Certificate and Bachelor in Education in Early Childhood Development and Family Studies programme.
Michael A. Bucknor
Michael A. Bucknor is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Global Studies and Decolonial Practice in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He previously taught at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona Campus in Jamaica, where he was the Chair of the Department of Literatures in English and Public Orator for the Mona Campus, both for two terms. He is a former Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS), currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature.
Michael Kelleher
Michael Kelleher is the director of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University and former Artistic and Associate Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, New York. His published collections of poetry include Visible Instruments (Chax, 2017), Museum Hours (BlazeVOX, 2016), Human Scale (BlazeVOX, 2007), and To Be Sung (BlazeVOX, 2004).
Nailah Folami Imoja
Nailah Folami Imoja (née Charmaine Gill), winner of Barbados’s Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Competition 2024 and Bermuda’s Writer in Residence 2025, is a Barbadian/British novelist, poet, spoken word artist, and educator. A teacher by day, she relies on more than three decades of teaching experience (from kindergarten teacher to university tutor) and a keen sense of humour to survive each day in the classroom.
As poet, novelist, journalist, and editor, Nailah has contributed significantly to the Barbadian litscape and aims to entertain and enlighten with her work. She is author of numerous novellas including Colourblind, To Protect & Serve and Fantasy Fulfilled which are available via smashwords.com. Her greatest opus thus far is her young adult daughter.
Nicholas Boggs
Nicholas Boggs is a writer and independent scholar. He rediscovered and coedited a new edition of James Baldwin’s out-of-print collaboration with the French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018), and his writing has been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin and James Baldwin Now. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York. His biography Baldwin: A Love Story will be published in August 2025.
Nicholas Laughlin
Nicholas Laughlin is festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest and the former editor of Caribbean Beat and The Caribbean Review of Books. He has published two books of poems,The Strange Years of My Life (2015) and Enemy Luck (2019), and a book of genre-fluid “microtexts”, Bird Machine (2024). He is editor of a collection of early essays by C.L.R. James, Letters from London (2003); a revised and expanded edition of V.S. Naipaul’s family correspondence, Letters Between a Father and Son (2009); and the anthology So Many Islands (2018). He is co-director of Alice Yard, a contemporary art collective based in Port of Spain.
Olive Senior
Olive Senior, Jamaica’s 2021-2024 Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of 18 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and children’s literature and other published work. Her many awards include Canada’s Writers Trust Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Her work has been taught internationally and is widely translated. Olive Senior is from Jamaica and lives in Toronto, Canada, but returns frequently to the Caribbean which remains central to her work.
Otancia Noel
Otancia Noel is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago. She grew up between the south and the Jamaat Al Muslimeen compound. She has a degree in Mass Communication and an MFA in Creative Writing Prose Fiction. Her stories, articles, and scholarly articles have been published in various journals. She was longlisted for the Johnson and Amoy Caribbean Prize both in fiction (2019) and non-fiction (2020). She is also winner of the Hachette and Hodder Education UK Island Voices Caribbean Contemporary Prize 2022. Town on Fire is her debut short fiction collection
Patricia Mohammed
Patricia Mohammed is a scholar, writer and filmmaker. She is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies and Campus Coordinator/Chair, School for Graduate Studies and Research at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, a post she has held variously since 2007. She has headed the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at St Augustine for various periods and from 1994-2002 was appointed as first head of the Mona Unit, Centre for Gender and Development Studies, UWI. For the Fall semester 2007 she was Visiting Professor at State University of New York at Albany and has had visiting fellowships at University of Warwick and Queen’s University, Belfast. She was a recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s regional award for Excellence in Research at The UWI in 2015.
Phillip Simon
Phillip Simon was fascinated by many things as a child, but one of his main interests was Japan. This fascination remained with him until his adult years, causing him to move to Japan for two years as an Assistant Language Teacher teaching English in high schools. His experiences while there and his appreciation for Japan and his home country of T&T have led him to create the Petra series, which currently includes two books; Petra and the Poui and Petra and the Panman’s Daughter.
Randy Ablack
Randy Ablack is a fifty-six-year-old Trinidadian writer. He started writing poetry as a teenager and later became interested in playwriting. He has done playwriting workshops with Raymond Ramcharitar and, most notably, “Festival Arts as Cultural Performance” with the late Professor Tony Hall. This resulted in the production of his short play The Same Ol’ Mas by the Trinidad Theatre Workshop and the radio play The Serpents Mouth by NDATT. These plays address social concerns, namely Trinidad and Tobago’s 1990 attempted coup and police corruption. Ablack then successfully pursued a degree in Literature and Communications which resulted in him entering UWI’s Creative Writing MFA programme. Concurrent with his academic pursuits, he worked for twenty-eight years in the Pointe-à-Pierre refinery, which provided much material for his upcoming anthology about its demise, The Concrete Jungle Book. Ablack believes that the writing process is a search for meaning and an opportunity to examine your life.
Rayne Affonso
Rayne Affonso graduated from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine with a BA Spanish and Literatures in English with First Class Honours. She works as a Spanish interpreter.Her poetry can be found in SPECTRUM: Poetry Celebrating Identity (2022) published by Renard Press and several journals. She is a 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee and was a finalist in the Short Fiction Story Contest for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean (2023).
Rhoda Reddock
Rhoda Reddock is Professor Emerita of Gender, Social Change and Development at The University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago and former deputy principal. After completing her undergraduate studies at The University of the West Indies, Mona and St. Augustine campuses, she did her masters at the Institute for Social Studies, The Hague and Doctorat at the University of Amsterdam. She served as head of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies during its formative years. Active in the national and Caribbean Women’s Movement and other social movements, she is the recipient of numerous national, regional and international awards including the Triennial CARICOM Award for Women 2002 and an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 2012. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume Entangled Inequalities: Decolonial Perspectives on Global Inequalities — Europe and the Caribbean, with Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodriguez, Anthem Press, 2021.
Richard Charan
Richard Charan has had a 25-year career in journalism and is employed as the multimedia editor with Caribbean Communications Network, the parent company of the Express and TV6. Charan’s writing has earned him multiple awards, including the MATT/RBTT media award for excellence in journalism, and then a PAHO award for feature/investigative writing. Last year, Charan won several CBU media awards for news and investigative writing. He is also the author of The Histtory Project, a long-running series in the Express newspaper. He has since collaborated with Ian Randle Publishers Limited out of Jamaica to publish the book titled The Village of One. Charan is also co-authoring a biography on one of Trinidad’s famed artists, and is also working on two non-fiction novels.
Richard Lynch
Richard Lynch is a a policy and strategy consultant, with extensive experience in national, regional, and international security and development. In 2017, he retired from the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force (at the rank of Major), having completed 22 years of distinguished service. He is also a former Director of International Affairs in the T&T Ministry of National Security and Senior Advisor to the Minister of National Security. His portfolio included a broad range of regional and international stakeholders (North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean), towards advancing national and multinational frameworks on national, regional, and international security and development.
Rinaldo Walcott
Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and the Carl V. Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies. He is also the Chair in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo; Rinaldo’s research focuses on the cultural expression of Black life with an interest in the transnational, diasporic and the national crosscurrents of Black creativities. Rinaldo is the author of number of single authored, co-authored, and co-edited books. His more recent work is The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (Duke, 2021) and On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (Biblioasis, 2021) which was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award in 2021. Currently Rinaldo is working on two monographs, one on freedom and the sea, and another on Black queer expressive culture. A third work seeks to grapple with the possibilities of achieving utopia from the grips of the catastrophe that threatens to consume all of planetary life. Rinaldo was born in Barbados. He divides his time between the city of Buffalo and the city of Toronto.
Ronald Cummings
Ronald Cummings teaches in the English Department at Brock University in Canada. His work has appeared in Caribbean journals such as Small Axe, New West Indian Guide, the Journal of West Indian Literature and the Caribbean Review of Books. He has co-edited two critical volumes: Caribbean Literature in Transition 1970-2020 with Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams University Occupation with Nalini Mohabir (Black Rose Books, 2021). He is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (forthcoming with Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). Ronald is book reviews editor at sx salon.
Rubadiri Victor
Rubadiri Victor is a multi-media artist working in eight mediums; he is also a cultural activist. He is the author of Meditation on the Traditions a photo-essay on Traditional Mas, and publisher of Generation Lion Magazine. He is the founder of the Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago- T&T’s primary artist representative body, and the Wire Bend Folklore Theatre which combines traditional artisanry with interactive animation to depict folklore. Anansi and the 10 Dragons is the first of a 7-part series depicting adventures of Anansi’s grandmother as a young Spider. The series is part of a larger Universe of books entitled Myths for a New Time. ‘
Ryan Bachoo
Ryan Bachoo has been a multimedia journalist for the past 15 years, covering numerous topics including news and current affairs, politics, sport, and climate change. As a presenter, he has also hosted several programmes, including anchoring the primetime news and the morning show. In 2023, he copped the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s Best Caribbean Documentary Award for his production of Concordat. He has also been Editor of the Year for the last two years at Guardian Media where he works. In 2025, he published his debut novel, An Unending Search. The novel reflects Bachoo’s deep appreciation for West Indian literature and his commitment to preserving Caribbean storytelling traditions. His aim is to re-energise West Indian storytelling and inspire the young generation to not only read but write Caribbean literature.
Satnarine Balkaransingh
Satnarine Balkaransingh, PhD, is an economist, playwright, and Kathak Classical dancer and choreographer with the Nrityanjali Theatre. His new book Kunuwaton celebrates the First Peoples’ influences in Trinidad and Tobago’s cuisine.
Shakira Burton
Born and raised in deep South Moruga, Shakira’s passion for poetry began as a student at Cowen Hamilton Secondary. Teacher, arts educator and creative are just a few words to describe her. As an artist she thrives to be the voice of the 99% and use her talent as a medium to inspire change throughout Trinidad and Tobago. As the reigning First Citizens National Poetry Slam Champion, Shakira is focused on embracing different opportunities to allow the artform of spoken word to grow and expand.
Shivanee Ramlochan
Shivanee Ramlochan’s first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 People’s Choice T&T Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Shivanee was shortlisted for the 2018 Bridport Prize for Poetry. “The Red Thread Cycle”, from her debut collection, won a Small Axe Literary Competition Prize for Poetry, and was on audiovisual display at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Find her work online at www.novelniche.net, shivaneeramlochan.com, @novelniche
Simone Leid
Simone Leid is a poet and gender advocate from Trinidad and Tobago. As a gender, community development and climate justice practitioner, her writing often draws from the stories she encounters in the course of her work on the ground in the Caribbean. She has had poems published in SX Salon, Callaloo Journal and Tongues of the Ocean. She is a fellow of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers, the Callaloo Writers workshop and the Moko Poetry Masterclass. She is currently awaiting the award of her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of the West Indies, St, Augustine. She is completing her first poetry collection tentatively titled Mother Tongue, which explores the lives of working-class Caribbean women, particularly in relation to their inextricable role in mothering.
Sonja Dumas
Sonja Dumas is an arts consultant, performer, choreographer, teacher, filmmaker and writer. She is a founder and co-director of COCO Dance Festival, as well as the founder and artistic director of her dance company, Continuum Dance Project. She is also the author of the children’s story album Once Upon a Caribbean Time, a collection of original Caribbean folktales for children, and more recently she founded Zum-Zum Museum, an interactive children’s museum.
Talia Khan
Talia Khan graduated from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine with a BA in Spanish and French with First Class Honours. She is a Spanish interpreter/translator for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. She has also contributed to various humanitarian efforts with the Ryu Dan Empowerment Foundation, including and not limited to mentoring and teaching basic English to Venezuelan migrant children.
Tracy Assing
Tracy Assing is a writer, editor and filmmaker. Her 2010 film The Amerindians explored Assing’s own identity, the indigenous history of the islands and the political structure of the Santa Rosa Carib Community (now the First People’s Community).
V. Ramsamooj Gosine
V. Ramsamooj Gosine was educated at Corinth Teachers’ College and UWI, St. Augustine . His works have been published in newspapers and magazines, The Caribbean Writer and BIM, and broadcast on the BBC. He has received awards from the National Cultural Council, The Hindu Women’s Organisation, and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association. He is the author of seven books and has been one of the major contributors to two books on builders of Chaguanas.
Ved Valmiki
Aaron Valmiki Rampersadsingh, better known by his spiritual name: Ved, carries intimate knowledge and experience of the spiritual dimension of Yoga cultivated from his lifelong association with the living Master Sri Vasudeva, intense spiritual exploration, and service as a yoga teacher. He attended Presentation College San Fernando before pursuing his bachelor’s degree in Psychology in the United States on scholarship.
After his mother’s passing from a long battle with cancer, he spent some time in an ashram and went on pilgrimage to the Himalayas. This surfaced the inspiration to share yoga and spiritual practice in service to his community.
“Start meditating Today,” was written to serve persons of every faith who are interested in learning meditation for wellness, self-awareness and spiritual connection. It is the product of teaching hundreds of meditation classes and workshops over the past eight years and serves as a manual to begin your meditation journey.
Vindhar Suraj
Vindhar Suraj loves to write. As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, he draws heavily on his island/Caribbean life for inspiration. His interest is in representing the Caribbean experience by drawing on techniques of magical realism to create familiar yet unique perspectives. Fantasy and magic are part of his world. He is working on his first novel, which incorporates local folklore into a local setting.