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Thomas C. Addington, Howard University
Thomas C. Addington is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., specializing in Caribbean Literature under the direction of Dr. Curdella Forbes. His dissertation examines representations of (and confrontations with) the U.S. South in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean fiction, specifically in the work of Erna Brodber, Elizabeth Nunez, Fred D’Aguiar, and Roland Watson-Grant. He was awarded an M.A. in English from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana and has recently been published in the Journal of Ethnic American Literature.
Simone Alexander, Steton Hall University
Nicole Aljoe, Northeastern Univeristy
Nicole Aljoe is Director of African American Studies Program and Associate Professor of English and African American Studies, Northeastern University. She is Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac and Co-director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive both associated with Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and the Snell Library’s Digital Scholarship Group. Editor, Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society.
Her research focuses on 18th and 19th Century Black Atlantic and Caribbean literatures with a specialization on the slave narrative. She has published essays and chapters in The Journal of Early American Literature, African American Review, Anthurium, The Oxford Companion to African American Slave Narratives, and Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature. She is the author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press, 11/2014) and, most recently, A Literary History of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer, April 2018). Currently, she is at work on two new projects: one that examines the relationships between narratives of black lives and the rise of the novel in Europe and the Americas in the 18th century and another project examining the aesthetic translations of the neo-slave narrative genre within Contemporary Caribbean cultural production.
Jossiana Arroyo, University of Texas at Austin
Born in Puerto Rico, Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (BA, University of Puerto Rico, 1989, PhD University of California at Berkeley, 1998) is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in the analysis of Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures in the Americas, queer studies, colonial and post-colonial theories in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana, 2003) a critique of cultural racism in the work of Gilberto Freyre (Brasil) and Fernando Ortiz (Cuba) and several Cuban and Brazilian novels, and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (Palgrave, 2013), an analysis of transnational, racial and colonial dimensions of Masonic encounters in the circum-Caribbean and the United States (1850-1898). She has contributing essays on Brazilian and Caribbean Literatures at Lusosex Sexualities in the Portuguese Speaking World (2002) and Technofuturos (2008). She has published at Encuentro de la cultura cubana, La Habana Elegante, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Journal of Latino Studies, among many other national and international publications. Her new research project entitled Mediascapes is an analysis of local and transnational Caribbean cultures in new media and their ways of representing race, ethnicity and culture in neoliberal times. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The University of Texas, Austin.
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Carol Bailey
Carol Bailey is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Westfield State University in Massachusetts, where she teaches courses in World, Postcolonial, Caribbean and Cross-Cultural, and Women’s Literatures. She is the author of A Poetics of Performance: The Oral-Scribal Aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction (UWI Press, 2014).
Kelly Baker Josephs, City University of New York
Kelly Baker Josephs is Associate Professor of English at York College, CUNY. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (2013), editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform, and manager of The Caribbean Commons website. Her current project, “Caribbean Articulations: Storytelling in a Digital Age,” explores the intersections between new technologies and Caribbean cultural production.
Anita Baksh, LaGuardia Community College
Anita Baksh is Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College at the City University of New York (CUNY). Her teaching and research interests include Caribbean literature, South Asian and African diasporic literatures, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and composition. Her publications on Indo-Caribbean cultural production and women’s writing appear in journals such as The Journal of West Indian Literature and in collections such as Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016).
Amrita Bandopadhyay, University of Florida
Amrita Bandopadhyay is a third year PhD candidate in English at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA. Her doctoral dissertation is on Indo-Caribbean women’s literature, with a particular focus on the refashioning of women’s identity, education and cultural practices through migration and travel. Her research interests include narratives of the South Asian and the Asian Diaspora, women’s literature, travel writing, Global Anglophone literature and digital humanities.
Camille R. Banks, Daley College
Camille Banks works in Caribbean Literature and Anglophone African Literature. She's interested in the connections between the Literatures of African people globally and is devising a critical theory for African Diasporic literature. She was told by a mentor to start calling herself a poet who writes fiction and is currently working on a novel. She currently lives and teaches in Chicago.
Lia Bascomb, Georgia State University
Lia T. Bascomb is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, and affiliated with the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at Georgia State University. She is trained as an interdisciplinary black studies scholar with emphases in diaspora theory, cultural theory, visual culture, performance studies, gender and sexuality, and literature. Her scholarly interests focus on representations and performances of nation, gender, and sexuality across the African diaspora with an emphasis on the Anglophone Caribbean. She has published in journals such as Meridians, Souls, Palimpsest, and the Black Scholar and her forthcoming book manuscript is titled In Plenty and In Time of Need: Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity.
Laura Bass, University of Miami
Ian Bethell Bennett, University of The Bahamas
Ian Bethell Bennett is associate professor and former dean of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of the Bahamas. He holds degrees in Trade Policy, Cultural Studies, English and Spanish. His research interests include gender in development and migration. His recent publications focus on unequal development in the Caribbean, particularly in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico where resorts take over land and disenfranchise locals. He writes on art and culture and has participated in NE7 and NE8 as well as in 2018 Double Dutch Hot Water with Plastico Fantastico as a part of the Expo 2020 collective. He works around Haitian and Cuban migration to and through the Bahamas, and is currently working on a project on Statelessness in the Bahamas. He writes in the daily newspapers on gender and development.
Suzanne Boswell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Suzanne Boswell is a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is writing a dissertation on the intersection between Caribbean literature, Science Fiction, and the transformation of developmental time.
Carole Boyce Davies, Cornell University
Kate Brennan, University of Toronoto
Kate Brennan is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, working on Caribbean and Irish literature with a focus on contemporary poetry. As K. Brisley Brennan, her work on comparing the Caribbean and Ireland is forthcoming from Caribbean Quarterly, her analysis on graphic violence and the social fantastic in the fiction of Patrick McCabe is forthcoming from Brill Rodopi, and her exploration of the relationship between language and violence in the form of a shibboleth can be found in Caribbeam Irish Connections (2015) from the University of the West Indies Press. She received her MA from the University of Pittsburgh’s program in Critical and Cultural Studies.
J. Dillon Brown, Washington University in St. Louis
Winnifred Brown Glaude, The College of New Jersey
Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Ph.D. Associate Professor in the departments of African American Studies and Sociology & Anthropology at The College of New Jersey (USA). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Temple University (2003). She is the author of Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica (Vanderbilt University Press, 2011). Other publications include ‘Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause I’m Pretty: Race, Gender and the Bleached Body in Jamaica.’ Social and Economic Studies, 62: 1 &2 (2013) 1-26; ‘Fact of Blackness?: The problem of the bleached body in contemporary Jamaica.’ Small Axe: A Caribbean Platform for Criticism 24, Fall 2007; ‘Size Matters: Figuring Gender in the Black Jamaican Nation.’ Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 7, 1 pp. 38-68, and ‘Spreading Like a (Dis)ease? Afro-Jamaican Higglers and the Dynamics of Race/Color, Class and Gender’ in Dan Cook (ed.) The Lived Experience of Public Consumption by Palgrave, MacMillan, 2008. She has also edited, Doing Diversity in Higher Education: Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies (Rutgers University Press, 2009).
Amanda L. Bryan, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Amanda Bryan is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focus is on postcolonial studies, Caribbean Studies, and Gender Studies. Her dissertation emphasizes the concept of errantry at the micro-levels of embodied, everyday movements that occur during transport, moments of stasis, rituals, and sexuality. She has been published in the Irish Studies Review and the Journal of Children’s Literature Studies.
Michael Bucknor, The University of The West Indies, Mona
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Lara Cahill-Booth
Lara Cahill-Booth earned a Ph.D. from the University of Miami. Her scholarship on cultural geography and Caribbean literature and performing arts has been published in TDR: The Drama Review, e-misférica, and Journal of Postcolonial Literature. She previously worked with Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal and co-edited a double issue on “The Asian Experience in the Caribbean.” Dr. Cahill-Booth is currently an Assistant Professor in the English and Communications Department at Miami Dade College.
Fély Catan, University of Miami
Fely Catan is a PhD candidate in the Modern Languages and Literatures department. She earned a master in Spanish Arts from the University of Texas at Brownsville and a masters in French literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on decoloniality and non-sovereignty in the Caribbean. She looks at the way artists from Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe and Martinique have questioned the Eurocentric normative category of sovereignty (of the Nation-State) and attempted to forge new epistemologies in a decolonial attitude.
Kahlil Chaar Pérez, Harvard University
Kahlil Chaar-Pérez is an independent scholar whose work addresses Caribbean and U.S. Latino aesthetics and politics from the nineteenth century to the present. Their most recent article was published in Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).
Myriam J.A. Chancy, Scripps College
Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. Her novels include: The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree 2010) winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, for Best Fiction 2010, The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press 2005), and Spirit of Haiti (Mango 2003), shortlisted in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize in 2004. Her academic publications include: From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions from Haiti, Cuba & The Dominican Republic (WUP 2012), Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers 1997; ebook, 2011), and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple 1997) which was awarded the Choice OAB Award in 1998. She served as an editorial advisory board member for PMLA from 2010-12, as a Humanities Advisor for the Fetzer Institute from 2011-13, and as a 2018 advisor for the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Raj Chetty, St, John's University, Queens
C. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Amherst University
Kenneth Connell, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Dr. Kenneth Connell received his undergraduate and postgraduate training in from The UWI St. Augustine & Cave Hill Campuses, and graduated with an MBBS and DM Internal Medicine degrees in 2000 and 2006 respectively. He was awarded a Barbados National Development Scholarship in 2007. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy degree on completion of studies from King's College London, University of London. He joined the Faculty of Medical Sciences as Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology in 2011 and assumed duties of Deputy Dean - Phase 1 in August 2014 - August 2017. He has held several administrative responsibilities within the faculty, and the campus, including the first examiner for Medicine and Therapeutics examinations, and is currently Chair of the Principal’s Task Force on International
Outreach.
Margaret Cox, Savannah State University
Margaret Cox was born in Carriacou, Grenada and grew up in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a PhD in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly articles include “Buchi Emecheta: Re-imaging the African Feminine Self” and “Alice Walker and Claudia Rankine: Reclaiming the Ocularity of the Self.” She is also the author of Tales of Women, a volume of poetry that speaks about the experiences of women of the African and Caribbean Diasporas. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Savannah State University.
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Raphael Dalleo, Bucknell University
Raphael Dalleo is Professor of English at Bucknell University. His book, American Imperialism's Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism, won the Caribbean Studies Association's 2017 Gordon K. and Sibyl Lewis award for best book about the Caribbean. American Imperialism’s Undead was completed with the support of an NEH-sponsored residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor Dalleo is also author of Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, editor of Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies, coeditor of Haiti and the Americas, and coauthor of The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature. He serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of West Indian Literature and Latino Studies.
Jarrel De Matas, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Jarrel De Matas is a postgraduate student in English Literature at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. His research interests are Caribbean Literature, Postmodern theory, and Speculative Fiction. He is published in the Journal of Comparative Politics and the Journal of West Indian Literature with a book review of Karen Lord’s New World, Old Ways: Speculative Tales of the Caribbean published in the Small Axe journal.
Odette De Siena, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Odette Cortés is a graduate student in the Modern Languages department at Universidad Nacional Autóma de México. She received her BA in English from the same institution in 2014. Currently, she teaches poetry and writing to freshmen in the undergraduate program. Her research interest is the presence of orality in Caribbean poetry.
Kathleen DeGuzman, San Francisco State University
Kathleen DeGuzman is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses in postcolonial studies, Caribbean literature, and the novel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Studies in the Novel, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. She is currently completing a book manuscript that compares the Anglophone Caribbean and Victorian Britain as archipelagic cultures with surprisingly similar approaches to literary form.
Elizabeth Dillon, Northeastern University
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is Distinguished Professor and Chair of English at Northeastern University where she is founding Co-Director of the NULab for Maps, Texts, and Networks and teaches in the field of eighteenth-century transatlantic literary studies. She is the author of New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1659-1859 (Duke University Press in 2014) which received the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research from the American Society of Theatre Research and The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) which won the Heyman Prize for Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University. Together with Michael Drexler, she is co-editor of The Haitian Revolution and the Early U.S.: Histories, Geographies, and Textualities (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). She has published widely in journals on topics from aesthetics, to the novel in the early Atlantic world, to Barbary pirates, to, most recently, early Caribbean literature and performance. She is the Co-Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College and the former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. She is the recipient of the Excellence in Mentorship Award 2010-2011, awarded by the Graduate Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and has held research fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society and the John Carter Brown Library and received support from the Mellon Foundation, the ACLS, and the NEH for her research and writing.
Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia, UK
Alison Donnell is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of School of Literature, Creative Writing and Drama at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean, diasporic and black British writings. She is the General Editor of Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-2015 [3 volumes] with Cambridge University Press (2020) and is the lead researcher on a Leverhulme Trust funded project, 2017-2020, on ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: recovering the lost past and safeguarding the future’.
Carmen Duarte, Florida Atlantic University
Carmen Duarte is a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies at FAU. She studied Performing Arts at the Higher Institute of Art of Cuba and obtained a Master's Degree in Spanish at Florida Atlantic University. She is a playwright and narrator. Duarte directed the theater collective Luminar (1988-1993). Several of her plays were published under the title, ¿Cuánto me das marinero? (Editorial Letras Cubanas, Pinos Nuevos Collection, 1994). Since 1993 she has been living in Miami, where she has written the novels Hasta la vuelta (Plaza Mayor, 2001), La danza de los abanicos (Egales, 2006), Donde empieza y acaba el mundo (Aduana Vieja, 2014) and El inevitable rumbo de la brújula (Aduana Vieja, 2016). In the United States, she wrote the radio soap opera Ausencia quiere decir olvido (1998), later turned into a theater piece and also the monologue “El adiós de Alejandra Sol" (2003). In Miami, she has worked as a journalist and producer of radio and television.
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Sally A. Everson, University of Bahamas - North
Sally A. Everson is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at the University of The Bahamas. She has a Ph.D. in Anglophone Caribbean Literature from the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Dr. Everson is on the Editorial Board of Sargasso, a journal of Caribbean literature, language and culture, a peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Puerto Rico. Her research interests include Caribbean literary history, pre-post emancipation literature and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic, and digital humanities.
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Marta Fernández-Campa, University of East Anglia, UK
Marta Fernández Campa, PhD is a senior research associate at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is currently working on the Leverhulme research project ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage’. She has previously worked at the University of Reading and St Louis University, Madrid, and has been the recipient of research fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on literary archives, and the influences and dialogue between Caribbean literature and visual artwork. Marta’s research has been published on various journals and magazines including Anthurium, Arc, Small Axe and Caribbean Beat..
Jared Flurry, University of Miami
Jared Flurry is an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami. His research interests include early twentieth-century Caribbean literature, war literatures, and postcolonial studies.
Rhonda Frederick, Boston College
Ifeona H. Fulani, New York University
Ifeona Fulani is a Clinical Professor in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. Her research interests are Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies, literatures of Africa and its diasporas, Transnational Feminisms and Writing. Her scholarly publications include an edited volume of essays titled Archipelagos of sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music (University of West Indies Press, 2012), as well as articles and reviews, most recently in Atlantic Studies and Caribbean Quarterly. She has also published a novel titled Seasons of Dust (Harlem River Press, 1997) and a collection of short stories titled Ten Days in Jamaica (Peepal Tree Press, 2012). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from New York University.
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Johanna X.K. Garvey, Fairfield UniversityJohanna X. K. Garvey received her BA from Pomona College (in French) and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (in comparative literature). She is an associate professor of English at Fairfield University, where she was founding Co-Director of the Women’s Studies Program and founding Co-Director of the Program in Black Studies: Africa and the Diaspora. She is currently Co- Director of Black Studies. Her areas of expertise include Caribbean women writers, literature of the African Diaspora, gender and sexuality studies, and global women’s literature in a cultural studies framework. She has published articles and book chapters on Ann Petry, Michelle Cliff, Merle Collins, Paule Marshall, Dionne Brand, Shani Mootoo, Patricia Powell, Maryse Condé, and others, in Callaloo, The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, Textual Practice, Anthurium, Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé, Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, Black Liberation in the Americas, and elsewhere. She has co-edited a volume titled Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). A book manuscript “The Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora,” is under review with a university press. She has a book-in-progress on Dionne Brand, and has begun a book-length study titled “Toni Morrison’s Geographies of Trauma.”
Sheryl C. Gifford, Florida Atlantic University
Sheryl C. Gifford is a senior instructor in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her research interests include African American poetry, interdisciplinary pedagogy, and environmental art, particularly that which promotes social justice. One recent project contextualizes deCaires Taylor’s Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA) installation within Mexico’s tourism industry; another examines how Kwame Dawes’ collaborative works Hope’s Hospice and the Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica digital project utilize interdisciplinarity to reflect the ravages of dis-eases on the regional body and broaden the platform for social justice interventions.
Mirerza González Vélez, University of Puerto Rico
Mirerza González-Vélez is the co-principle investigator of the NEH digital humanities project Caribbean Diaspora: Panorama of Carnival Practices. She holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication and Journalism from the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on the roles that culture and communication play in the articulation of imagined identities. Her most recent scholarship addresses migration as a fluid experience. Her research has appeared in a variety of academic publications, including The Journal of Communication Inquiry, Political Communication and Sargasso. With Dr. Nadjah Ríos, González co-directed The Diaspora Project, a web based platform that showcased related scholarship on bilingual education and communication competence in the nearby island of St. Croix, USVI. The project received the financial support of institutional and external grants and is described at: http://dloc.com/diasporaproject and http://umbral.uprrp.edu/investigacion/proyecto-diaspora.
Angeletta Gourdine, Louisiana State University
Glyne A. Griffith, SUNY Albany
Glyne Griffith is Professor and Chair, Department of English, University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Deconstruction, Imperialism, and the West Indian Novel (UWI Press), and The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958 (Palgrave Macmillan). He’s working on a literary biography of Barbadian poet, novelist, essayist, and activist, George Lamming.
Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo
Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She completed a Master's degree in the English Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She is currently a doctoral student in the Graduate Program of Literatures in English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her interests include Caribbean literature, decolonial theory, and issues of sexual citizenship. Her most recent publication, entitled “Resignifying Shame and Abjection: A Queer Cultural Sovereignty in Manuel Ramos Otero’s Short Stories,” appeared in Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura.
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Njelle W. Hamilton, University of Virginia
Njelle Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Caribbean and African Literatures at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship engages with Caribbean narratology, especially the impact of orality, music, and trauma on the postcolonial novel form. Her forthcoming monograph, Phonographic Memories: Novel Recordings of Caribbean Exile, investigates the relationship between popular music and memory. Her current book project focuses on time, memory, and literary form in Caribbean sci-fi and speculative fiction.
Treviene A. Harris, University of Pittsburg
Treviene A. Harris is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research lies at the intersection of Caribbean studies, historical fiction, and sound studies and considers the form, function, and representation of sound in C20 Caribbean historical fiction. She is interested in the ways in which sound, aurality, and orality are deployed to complicate an understanding of history, collective memory, and cultural memory.
Allison Harris, Clemson University
Allison Harris is a lecturer in English at Clemson University. She earned her PhD from University of Miami in 2017. Her manuscript The American Dispossessed examines the diverse historical intimacies of Appalachia as a counternarrative to the current political whitewashing of the region.
David Hart, University of Wisconsin - La Crosse
David Hart is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin—La Crosse. He writes creatively, and teaches world literature, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and a general education course on Anglophone Caribbean literature. He has published poetry in Empty Shoes: Poems on the Hungry and the Homeless, and analyses of Caribbean literature in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Postcolonial Text, Dialog: A Bi-Annual Interdisciplinary Journal, and Radical Teacher.
Yanique Hume, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Yanique Hume is lecturer and coordinator of the Cultural Studies Programme at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. She specializes in the interdisciplinary field of Caribbean cultural studies with a focus on African diaspora religions and performance cultures, Caribbean thought, and popular culture. Yanique is the coeditor of two anthologies, Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013) and Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance (2016). She has also published on a wide range of topics, including Caribbean festive and sacred arts, diasporic tourism, as well as contemporary Cuban cultural politics. Among her recent publications is an edited volume on the Caribbean mortuary complex, Passages and Afterworlds, Duke University Press. Her current projects is a monograph on the diverse religious terrain of eastern Cuba. Yanique is the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the International Development Research Centre, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Nicole Hunte, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Nicola Hunte is a lecturer in the Literatures in English discipline at Cave Hill as well as assistant editor of POUi, Cave Hill’s journal of creative writing. Her research interests include the critical texts of Wilson Harris, African American prose fiction and speculative fiction.
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Camille Isaacs, OCAD University
Camille Isaacs is an Assistant Professor of English at OCAD University in Toronto, specializing in postcolonial, and black diasporic literatures, particularly the Caribbean. She has considered the transmission of affect through social media for African women in the diaspora: “Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence through Social Media in the Work of Adichie and Bulawayo” was published by Safundi in April 2016. In addition, her edited volume, Austin Clarke: Essays on His Works, was published by Guernica Editions in 2013. Her current research considers aging and memory in Caribbean literature.
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Denise Jarrett, Morgan State University
Denise M. Jarrett received her Ph.D. from Morgan State University. She is currently a full-time lecturer in the English and Language Arts Department at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. She is from Ocho Rios, Jamaica. Jarrett gained her first BA degree in English from the University of the West Indies, Mona. She has special interest in Adolescent Postcolonial Caribbean Literature, Ethnic and Cultural Studies, and Black Cultural Productions. Her publications include: “Identity Development and Survival Strategies in Selected Novels by Michael Anthony and Cyril Everard Palmer,” “Carnival and Southern Games: National Tradition and Personal Identity in Michael Anthony’s The Games Were Coming," and “Reading ‘Black’ Poverty in Postcolonial Caribbean Young Adult Fiction: Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando and Cyril Everard Palmer’s The Cloud with the Silver Lining.”
Jacqueline Jiang, University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras
Jacqueline Jiang Chieu received her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, with a concentration in American Literature, from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and is currently in the process of finishing her Master’s degree. Her professional interests focus on Caribbean Literature, Diaspora Studies, Decolonial Theory, and Creative Writing. A variety of her poems have been published by BlazeVOX Books in an anthology of up and coming writers. In addition, she is a poet mentor for Poetry Out Loud and offers Creative Writing workshops to children and adolescents.
Kwynn Johnson, Artist
Dr. Kwynn Johnson is a Visual Artist and a Haitian Studies Scholar. She has exhibited her work in the Caribbean, North America and in the UK. Johnson's Visual arts scholarship on Caribbean Cultural Geography has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journal publications.
Annette Joseph-Gabriel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. Her areas of research specialization include contemporary Caribbean literature, black transnational feminisms, and slavery and resistance in the Atlantic world. Her book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2019, examines black women’s articulations of citizenship through their work in anticolonial movements in Francophone Africa and the Antilles. Essays from this and other projects have appeared in journals including Small Axe, Women in French Studies, Nouvelles études francophones, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Slavery & Abolition and The French Review. She is managing editor of Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.
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Phillip Kaisary, Carleton University
Philip Kaisary is Assistant Professor of Critical Legal, Social, and Political Theory in the Department of Law & Legal Studies, and cross-appointed to the Department of English Language & Literature and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art & Culture (ICSLAC) at Carleton University, Canada. He is author of The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2014. Other publications include articles in Atlantic Studies, Law & Humanities, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), Slavery & Abolition, and various book chapters, on topics ranging from Haiti’s early independence constitutions, hemispheric American literary and cultural history, and human rights.
Oonya Kempadoo, Grenada Community Library & Resource Centre
Resident in Grenada and Montreal, Oonya was brought up in Guyana, has lived in Europe and worked for most of her life in various Caribbean islands. A creative writer and the author of three novels: Buxton Spice, Tide Running, All Decent Animals, she was named a “Great Talent for the 21st Century” by the Orange Prize judges and awarded a Casa De Las Americas Prize in 2002. Oonya is a US Fulbright Scholar alumni and works as a consultant, researcher and educator, focusing on social development and cross-disciplinary dialogue. She is co-founder and a director of the Grenada Community Library and member of PEN America.
Aliyah Khan, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Aliyah Khan is a native of Guyana and an Assistant Professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English and the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research areas are postcolonial Caribbean literature and contemporary Muslim and Islamic literatures, with emphases on race, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Khan’s academic and nonacademic writing appears in venues including GLQ, Studies in Canadian Literature, The Rumpus, Agents of Ishq, and the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies (forthcoming). She is currently working on a book on 19th-21st-century literary representations of Islam and Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean and Suriname.
April Conley Kilinski, Johnson University
April Conley Kilinski is Professor and Department Chair of English and Literature at Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee. Trained at the University of Tennessee, her academic interests include Caribbean, African, African American, and Immigrant literatures. She recently published “’Whiteness’ and Identity: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng” in an edited collection from The University Press of North Georgia; other publications include articles on Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Latin Deli.
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Karin Lachmising, Howard University
Karin Lachmising (1964) is an independent Surinamese writer and cross cultural communication professional based in The Netherlands (from August 2018). She is a multidisciplinary person. She writes poetry, essays and plays and has worked in the field of cross cultural communication and development with the indigenous and maroon communities of Suriname since 1985. In her work she addresses the relation of man and environment and women's freedom. She writes in Dutch and some of her work is published into English. Her debut poetry collection "Nergens groeit een boom die haar aarde niet vindt" (there is nowhere a tree can grow that doesn't find its soil) has been published by Uitgeverij "in de Knipscheer, 2013 and her first theater Monologue "ode aan Helstone" ( ode to music composer Helstone) was performed with the National Surinamese Music Ensemble and Youth Theater School On Stage Suriname. Ademhalen, (breathe) is her most recent theatre play discussing women's freedom and rights and has been published a year after the premiere, in 2017. Her new poetry collection 'seven rivers afar' is to be published in autumn 2018. Her essays and columns have a philosophical approach and appear in the monthly opinion magazine Parbode In 2012 she was part of the conference committee of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars conference held in Suriname. She is one of the executives on board of CARIBNET, the network for Caribbean Art Presenters.
Laurie Lambert, Fordham University - Lincoln Center
Laurie Lambert is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her research and teaching interests include Black Feminism, Caribbean Literature and History, Black Performance Studies, and Literatures and Cultures of American Imperialism. Lambert’s work has been published in journals including Anthurium, Cultural Dynamics, and the CLR James Journal. Her current book project, Forms of Survival: Black Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution, examines the gendered implications of political trauma in Caribbean literature.
Corey Lamont, Howard University, Washington, DC
Corey Lamont is a lecturer in the Department of English at Howard University. His research interests include Caribbean, African Diaspora, Gender and Cultural Studies. He earned his PhD at Howard University in 2015.
Loïsa Landragin, Aix Marseille Université
Loïsa Landragin is a doctoral candidate at Aix-Marseille University in France. Her doctoral thesis entitled "(En)Gendering the Nation in Black Women’s Poetry" consists in a comparative analysis of the poem collections of M. Nourbese Philip and Jackie Kay.
Renée Latchman, Howard University
Dr. Renée Latchman is an English lecturer at Howard University, Washington, DC. She is from Jamaica, W.I., where she gained her BA degree in Linguistics and French at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She completed her MA and Ph.D. at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland in English Language and Literature and has special interest in Multicultural and Caribbean Literature, Women’s Studies, and Identity Development. Her publications on Caribbean, women’s and migrant literature include “The Impact of Immigration on Mother-Daughter Relationships and Identity Development in Six Novels of the Caribbean Diaspora,” “The Tradition and Ramifications of Testing in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory,” “Female Identity Development in Paule Marshall’s Daughters,” and “West Indian Cultural Influences on Female Identity Development in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Praisesong for the Widow, and Daughters.”
Natalie Marie Léger, City University of New York
Natalie M. Léger is an Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She received her PhD in English Literature from Cornell University, completed an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tufts University and received the Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2016. She co-edited the Spanish language collection, Toussaint Louverture: Repensar un icono, with Mariana Past and is currently completing a book manuscript titled, Envision Otherwise: Haiti and the Decolonial Imaginary.
Ayana Legros, Duke University
Stacy J. Lettman, Florida Atlantic University
Stacy J. Lettman is as an Assistant Professor of English with a specialization in Caribbean literature and culture at Florida Atlantic University. Her current book project investigates the ways in which globalization replicates and exacerbates the legacies of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Taking an interdisciplinary approach in her research, Stacy brings together history and cultural studies with literary analysis to unmask the hegemony of globalization and its underlying neoliberal ideologies. She locates globalization as a mode of economic violence with linguistic and rhetorical undercurrents. Her larger peer-reviewed work on linguistic violence has been published as a peer-reviewed journal article in Encounters: An International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society and as a book chapter in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the Black and Irish Diasporas. Stacy received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California, where she was an Irvine Foundation Research Fellow with the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.
Hannah Lutchmansingh, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Hannah Lutchmansingh is a full-time PhD Literatures in English candidate at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus. Her areas of research include the Caribbean gothic imagination, spirituality, culture and trauma. Her most recent articles on the Tropical-Urban Imagination and Spectres of the Middle Passage have been published with E-Tropic Journal and Tout Moun Journal of Caribbean Studies, respectively.
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Antonia MacDonald, St. George's University
Antonia MacDonald is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, St. George’s University, Grenada. Prof. MacDonald writes on contemporary Caribbean women writers, St. Lucian literature and Eastern Caribbean popular culture. She has published articles in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), Callaloo and MaComere and is the author of Making Homes in the West/Indies (Garland, 2002) and editor of the collection, The Fiction of Garth St. Omer: A Casebook (2108).
Dyanne K. Martin, Broward University
Dyanne K. Martin is Assistant Professor of English at Broward College. Her research interests include semiotics, critical race theory, classical and neo-classical rhetoric, and hemispheric minority literatures, especially those of Caribbean, African American, and Latin American cultures. Her publications include articles on adolescent immigrant experiences in Caribbean literature, on the rhetoric of freedom, and on the semiotics of racial passing.
Enmanuel Martínez, Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, University of Miami
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (1999); Caribe Two-Ways?: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003), awarded the Second Prize, Category: Research and Literary Criticism, by the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña of the University of Puerto Rico in 2004; From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (2014). She recently co-edited two anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2016) and Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016). She is co-editing an anthology with Michelle Stephens titled “Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations” and working on her fifth book project, Archipiélagos de ultramar: Rethinking Colonial and Caribbean Studies, which uses comparative archipelagic studies as a historical and theoretical framework to propose a different research agenda for the study of cultural productions in the Caribbean between 1498 and 2010.
Ariel Martino, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Ariel Martino is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University--New Brunswick. Her interests include African American and Caribbean literature, leftist movements of the twentieth century, and poetry and poetics. She is at work on a dissertation entitled "Paradoxes of Citizenship: Sovereignty, subjectivity and representation in black America 1929-1968."
Nadève Ménard, Université d’État d’Haïti, Port-au-Prince
Nadève Ménard is professor of literature at the École Normale Supérieure of Université d’État d’Haïti. She is the editor of Écrits d’Haïti: perspectives sur la littérature haïtienne contemporaine (1986-2006) (Karthala, 2011) and the Journal of Haitian Studies’ special volume on Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2013). She is also the author of Lyonel Trouillot, Les Enfants des héros: étude critique (Champion, 2016) and one of the editors of the forthcoming Haiti Reader (Duke). Translation projects include Gina Ulysse’s Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (with E. Trouillot, Wesleyan 2015) and the web exhibit Haiti: An Island Luminous (with E. Trouillot, 2016). She is currently working on an English translation of Le Fondateur devant l’histoire by St. Victor Jean-Baptiste and a manuscript currently titled Enduring Myths: Haitian Literature and Foreign Scholars.
Patricia Mohammed, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Patricia Mohammed is Full Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies and Director, Graduate Studies and Research. University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. She headed the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at UWI, Mona and at St Augustine and has lived and worked variously in The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Jamaica, the United States and Trinidad. She has published widely in the fields of gender, feminism and cultural studies and directed fifteen documentaries, two of them award winning films. Among her full-length publications are Gender Negotiations among Indians in Trinidad (Palgrave, 2001), Gendered Realities (UWI Press, 2002) and Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (Macmillan 2009). She served as the President of the Caribbean Studies Association for the year 2008/2009. Her most recent book is an autobiographical travelogue jointly written with Rex Dixon, entitled Travels with a Husband, (Hansib, 2016).
Joel Morales Rolón, University of Puerto Rico
Joel Morales Rolón is an MA student in the Department of Comparative Literature at The University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. He has participated in conferences and seminars on decoloniality, inequality, and race. His research interests include a contingent approach to urban poverty, related to both neocolonial factors such as displacement, economics, and biopower, as well as relational space, epistemology, and new social forms. In addition to his research, he has published short stories, poems and screenplays in various edited volumes and journals.
Rachel L. Mordecai, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Rachel L. Mordecai received her master’s degree from the University of the West Indies (Mona), and her doctorate from the University of Minnesota; she is an associate professor in the English Department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of West Indian Literature. She is the author of Citizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture (UWI Press, 2014), which investigates the role of expressive culture in negotiating and memorializing the politically tumultuous and culturally vibrant 1970s in Jamaica.
Rachel Moseley-Wood, University of the West Indies, Mona
Dr. Rachel Moseley-Wood is a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she teaches courses in literature and film studies. She is currently working on a book on place, nation and identity in Jamaican film. She has also published a number of essays on Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora film in regional and international journals.
H. Adlai Murdoch, Tufts University
H. Adlai Murdoch is Professor of French and Francophone Literature and Director of Africana Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel, and of Creolizing the Metropole: Migratory Metropolitan Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film. He is the co-editor of the essay collections Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies, Francophone Cultures and Geographies of Identity, and Metropolitan Mosaics and Melting-Pots: Paris and Montreal in Francophone Literatures, and of various special issues of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, and Research in African Literatures. His articles have appeared in Callaloo, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Francophone Postcolonial Studies, The Journal of Contemporary French Studies (Sites), L’Esprit créateur, Revue des sciences humaines, College Literature, the Journal of Romance Studies, the International Journal of Francophone Studies, American Literary History and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. His current research focuses on issues of diaspora, colonization, creolization and subjectivity in the French Caribbean and the New World.
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Anjali Nerlekar, Rutgers University
Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor in the Department of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia at Rutgers. Her research interests include multilingual Indian modernisms; Indo-Caribbean literature and the Indian diaspora; spatial and cartographic studies; translation and multilingualism; Caribbean and Postcolonial Studies; and Indian Book History. She teaches courses on Indo-Caribbean literature at Rutgers and has essays on David Dabydeen and on the fiction of Sam Selvon and Harold Sonny Ladoo (forthcoming). Her first book is on the post-1960 bilingual poetry from Bombay, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (2016, Northwestern University Press; 2017, Speaking Tiger Press). She has also co-edited a special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing (53.1/2, 2017) titled “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry.”
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Evelyn O'Callaghan, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Evelyn O’Callaghan is Professor of West Indian Literature, Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. Her published work includes articles and chapters on West Indian literature, particularly on women’s writing, alternative sexualities, early Caribbean narratives and more recently, ecocritical readings of Caribbean landscapes in visual and scribal. Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West Indian Literature, she serves on the advisory committees of several scholarly journals and recently co-edited interdisciplinary collection of essays on Caribbean Irish Connections.
Lisa Outar, Independent Scholar
Lisa Outar is an independent scholar who researches Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. She publishes in the areas of Indo-Caribbean literature, feminist writing and the connections between the Caribbean and other sites of the indentureship diaspora. She serves as a senior editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature. The book collection Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments that she co-edited with Dr. Gabrielle Hosein was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
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Lissa Paul, Brock University
Lissa Paul, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines Ontario, Canada, is an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and a co-editor of Keywords for Children’s Literature (2011). The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century, her first book on Eliza Fenwick was published in 2011. Her new biography, Eliza Fenwick (!766-1840): A Life Rewritten, will be published by the University of Delaware Press in January 2019, in their Early Modern Feminisms Series. Lissa’s research is generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.
Viviana Pezzullo, Florida Atlantic University
Viviana Pezzullo holds a Master Degree in Philology from the University of Naples, Italy. She is a PhD Student in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University, where she also works as Graduate Teaching Assistant. Her main areas of expertise are Italian and French Contemporary Literatures, with special emphasis on Life Writing and Women's Writing.
Atreyee Phukan, University of San Diego
Atreyee Phukan is Associate Professor in English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at U of San Diego where she teaches literary theory, post-colonial world literature, and literature of the global south. She has edited and authored works on post-colonial literature of South Asia and the anglophone Caribbean. Her current book project is a study of Indo-Caribbean literature, specifically Indo-Trinidadian, that traces its affinity with dominant theories of cultural hybridity in the anglophone West Indies.
Denise Pinnaro, Florida Atlantic University
Denise Pinnaro is a first year Ph.D. student in the Comparative Studies Program at Florida Atlantic University, and holds an M.A. in French literature from the same institution. Her research interests include 19 th and 20 th century French and Francophone literature, specifically modern theater, and film adaptations of this literature as a reflection of both historical and contemporary sociocultural values. She currently teaches an Introduction to World Literature course for FAU’s Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature as a Graduate Teaching Assistant.
Fátima Portorreal, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo (INTEC)
Tzarina T. Prater, Bentley University
Tzarina T. Prater is an Associate Professor of English in Bentley University's English and Media Studies Department where she teaches African American and Anglophone Caribbean literature as well as Gender and Cultural Studies. She has published articles on the work of Easton Lee, Kerry Young, Michelle Cliff, Patricia Powell, U.S. spectatorship of Hong Kong action cinema, digital platforms, and science fiction. She is currently working on her book project on Chinese Jamaican literary and cultural production entitled Labrish and Mooncakes: Chinese Jamaican Cultural Production and Nationalism.
Alanna Prince, Northeastern University in Boston
Alanna Prince is a graduate student studying English Literature at Northeastern University in Boston. Her work centers around contemporary Black literature, feminism, and visual culture. Prince earned her BA in Art & Visual Culture and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Bates College in 2013. Prince acts the Project Manager of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive where she takes a particular interest in representation and visual culture of the Caribbean as well as metadata and meta-archival discourses.
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Kate Ramsey, University of Miami
Kate Ramsey works on the politics of religion, law, and performance in the Caribbean; medicine and healing in the Atlantic world; Caribbean intellectual history, artistic production, and social movements; and the connection between anthropology and history. Her first book, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 2011), examines the history and legacies of penal and ecclesiastical laws against the Vodou religion in Haiti. She is co-editor with Louis Herns Marcelin of Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection (Lowe Art Museum, 2015). Ramsey’s next single-authored book project studies how Afro-Caribbean religions became a touchstone in the fields of mind-body medicine and psychology in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Her current research centers, as well, on the interlinked histories of Afro-Caribbean religion, U.S. imperialism, and museum collecting during the early to mid-twentieth century.
Nadjah Rios Villarini, University of Puerto Rico
Angel Rivera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Atabei Rivera Mirabal, University of Puerto Rico
From San Juan, Puerto Rico, Atabei Rivera Mirabal is a graduate student at the Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Interested in researching the intersections between literature, cinema and gender, especially in the light of the of Caribbean experience.
Ines P. Rivera Prosdocimi, University of Hartford
Carmen Haydée Rivera, University of Puerto Rico
Kimberly Robinson-Walcott, University of the West Indies, Mona
Kim Robinson-Walcott, PhD, is editor/head of Caribbean Quarterly, University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her publications include the scholarly work Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (UWI Press, 2006), Jamaican Art (Kingston Publishers, 1989, 2011) which she co-authored, The How to Be Jamaican Handbook (Jamrite Publications, 1988) which she co-authored and illustrated, and the children's books Dale's Mango Tree and Pat the Cat (Kingston Publishers, 1992; LMH Publishing, forthcoming), which she also illustrated. Her scholarly articles, book chapters, short stories and poems have been published in a number of journals and anthologies. A collection of short stories is forthcoming.
Malena Rodríguez Castro, University of Puerto Rico
Nelly Rosario, Texas State University
Nelly Rosario is author of Song of the Water Saints: A Novel, winner of a PEN/Open Book Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her fiction and non-fiction works appear in various journals and anthologies. Honors include the Sherwood Anderson Award in Fiction and a 2016 Creative Capital Artist Award in Literature for desveladas, a collaborative graphic novel project of visual conversations about the Americas. She was formerly on faculty in the MFA Program at Texas State University and a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program at MIT, her alma mater. Currently, she teaches at Williams College and is researcher and writer for the MIT Black History Project. Rosario is at work on a speculative novel about medicine.
Leah Rosenberg, University of Florida
Leah Rosenberg is associate professor of English at the University of she is the author of Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature and co-editor with J. Dillon Brown of Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature. She is co-chair of the dLOC advisory board.
Valeria Ruzina, Florida Atlantic University
Valeria Ruzina, originally Russian. 2005 - BA in International Business, San Diego State University, CA; 2009 - MA in Int'l Economic Relations, Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently studying MA in Comparative Literature Spanish/French at Florida Atlantic University.
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Denise Joan Sales Pitre, University of Puerto Rico
Denise Joan Salas Pitre has a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus and is in the process of completing a master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the UPR, Río Piedras Campus. They’re currently working on their thesis, “The Question of the Beast: Conceptualizations of Animals, Humans, and Monsters in Medieval and Modern Bestiaries”. They have published essays, poems, short stories and reviews in the literary magazines Identidad from the UPR, Aguadilla Campus, and El Vicio del Tintero from the UPR, Mayagüez Campus. Denise is also the teaching and research assistant of the Department of Comparative Literature’s director, Dr. Marian E. Polhill, co-editor of Identidad, member of the Comité Amplio para la Búsqueda de Equidad (Wide Committee to Search for Equity) as well as its western chapter, and part of the Working Team of the Colloquium ¿Del otro la’o?: Perspectives and Debates about the queer of the UPR, Mayagüez Campus.
Petal Samuel, University of Virginia
Petal Samuel is an assistant professor in the Department of African, African American, & Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. She specializes in twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean literature and Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics, and aesthetics. Petal’s manuscript-in-progress, Polluting the Soundscape, examines how the management of the soundscape—through noise abatement laws and public discourses condemning noise—has served as a crucial avenue of racial and colonial governance in both the pre- and post-colonial Caribbean and throughout the Caribbean diaspora. The manuscript highlights the work of Afro-Caribbean women writers who embrace forms of “noisemaking” against the grain of these laws and public discourses, reclaiming them as subversive grammars that are integral to decolonization. Her work is published in Anthurium, The Black Scholar, and small axe salon.
Karen Sanderson Cole, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Dr. Karen Sanderson Cole is a Lecturer at the University of the West Indies in the English Language Foundation Unit where she works as the course administrator for a range of Foundation courses. A graduate of the University of West Indies she has an MhEd in Teaching and Learning at the Tertiary Level, as well as a MPhil and Phd in Literatures in English. Her research interests include political autobiographies, representations of black women in popular culture and academic writing.
Tarika Sankar, University of Miami
Tarika Sankar is a third-year PhD student in English literature at the University of Miami and graduate project manager at the WhatEvery1Says Project. Her research interests include Indo-Caribbean feminisms, queer theory, and digital humanities. In particular, she is interested in how second-generation Indo-Caribbean women negotiate race, gender, sexuality and postcoloniality in the North Atlantic. She is also a recipient of University of Miami and Holmes fellowships.
Wilfredo Rafael Santiago Hernández, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras
Wilfredo R. Santiago Hernández is a second year MA graduate student majoring in English, with a concentration in Caribbean diaspora studies, in the Master’s Program of the Department of English, College of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. He graduated from his Bachelor’s also majored in English Arts with a minor in History, at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey Campus. He was also part of an art collective organization at Cayey called HAPTS (Sociedad de Historia Arte Producción Tecnología) where he was involved in the development of the community’s art exhibitions and was a former member of Sigma Tau Delta an English major honor society as well.
Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, Emerson College
Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College. She is currently completing the book, Constructing the Caribbean: How Literary Magazines Incubated a Region. She has published "Productions of Cultural Combat in Tropiques" in the South Atlantic Quarterly's Special Issue on Aimé Césaire and “Governing Readability or How to Read Césaire’s Cabrera” in Inti: revista de literatura hispánica. She also co-edited a Special Issue on Nicolás Guillén of the CLR James Journal (2015). Her recent literary translations include works by Rita Dove, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, and José Ramón Sánchez. She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami.
Isis Semaj-Hall, University of the West Indies, Mona
Isis Semaj-Hall is a decolonial feminist, and cultural analyst. Shaped by her Jamaican childhood and New York adolescence, she has written essays and commentaries on a wide range of topics including sound studies, remix theory, Rihanna, Ishawna, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, dub, and dancehall. Semaj-Hall is co-founder and editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing online magazine, author of the “write pon di riddim” blog, and as a lecturer (assistant professor) she explores gender studies, hero fiction, reggae poetry, and popular culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Karen M. Serrano Maldonado, University of Puerto Rico
Karen M. Serrano Maldonado, born and raised in Puerto Rico, is currently studying her Master's degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus. She has a Bachelor's degree in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus. From an early age, her interests in literature have gravitated towards latin-amiercan and latin-caribbean works, although more recently she has been interested in science fiction. She has published short stories in local academic journals and in future years she will pursue a career in journalism.
Geraldine Skeete, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Dr Geraldine Skeete is a lecturer in Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus and has also lectured, coordinated and tutored in the English Language Foundation and literary linguistics programmes. She has published in The Year’s Work in English Studies and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, among others; and is co-editor of the book The Child and the Caribbean Imagination and the online Tout Moun: Caribbean Journal of Caribbean Studies. Her research interests are Caribbean literature, literary linguistics, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Béatrice Skokan, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Béatrice Skokan is Curator of Caribbean Collections for the University of Miami Libraries. Much of her work has focused on the historical documentation of oral and immigrant cultures of South Florida. Her publications include: “From Haiti to Miami: Security, Serendipity, and Social Justice” published in Informed Agitation, Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond (Litwin Books, 2013), “The Collaborative Archive from the African Diaspora: Access and Outreach” published in Identity Palimpsests: Ethnic Archiving in the U.S. and Canada (Litwin Books, 2014), and “An Oral History Interview” published in Human Operators: A Critical Oral History on Technology in Libraries and Archives (Litwin Books, 2017).
Alexandria Smith, Rutgers University
Alexandria Smith is a PhD Candidate in the Women's and Gender Studies department at Rutgers New Brunswick. She was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and received a B.A. in Comparative Women’s Studies and International Studies from Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Alexandria’s dissertation, “Blackness (from) Elsewhere,” explores conceptual and material geographies of blackness and queerness as they are portrayed in black literatures.
Rodolphe Solbiac, Université des Antilles, Martinique
Rodolphe Solbiac is Associate-Professor of English at Université des Antilles Schoelcher, Martinique. His field of research is Caribbean literature in English with a focus on Caribbean- Canadian writers. His research explores the cultural production of the diasporic Anglophone Caribbean from the perspective of emancipation dynamics, social transformation and reparation. He has published several articles on Caribbean including “From landscape to territory in Caribbean Canadian literature: Repairing caribbeanness and denied canadianness”. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1, Autumn 2017: 135-146.
He is the author of several books, among which: Emergence d’une identité caribéenne canadienne anglophone, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2015. He also co-edited three books including, Critical Perspectives on Conflict in Caribbean Societies of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. He recently edited two books dedicated to the assessment of postolonial though in 21 st century: Penser et repenser le postcolonial dans le Monde Atlantique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2018, and Pensée, pratiques et poétiques postcoloniales contemporaines, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2018.
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Ali Friedberg Tal-mason, Florida Atlantic University
Ali Friedberg Tal-mason is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University. She has a J.D. from the University of Miami School of Law, where she held editorial positions at the University of Miami Inter-American Law Review. Her professional experience includes public interest law, appellate law, and alternative dispute resolution. Her current research focuses on the intersections of law, literature, history, colonialism, and postcolonialism in the Americas. Ali is a GTA for the Department of English at FAU and currently teaches College Writing courses.
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Camila Valdés, Casa de las Américas
Vanessa K. Valdés, The City University of New York
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures at The City College of New York. A graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt Universities, her research interests include comparative studies of the literatures of the Americas, particularly Afro-Latinx, Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean, and African American Literatures. She is the editor of The Future Is Now: A New Look at African Diaspora Studies (2012) and Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora (2012). She is the author of Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) and Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). She serves as Book Review Editor of sx salon, an online literary salon on Caribbean literature and culture and the digital platform of Small Axe, as well as on the editorial board of PALARA, the Publication of the Afro-Latin American Research Association. She is the series editor of the Afro-Latinx Futures series at SUNY Press, which invites work that foregrounds the lives and contributions of Afro-Latinx peoples across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diasporic U.S. and Canada. It creates a home for work that challenges canonical formations, more firmly grounds hemispheric approaches, and centers Blackness in studies across the humanities and social sciences.
Keja Valens, Salem State University
Dr. Keja Valens is Professor of English at Salem State University. Dr. Valens teaches and writes on literatures of the Americas. Her recent work includes the co-edited volumes Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal (Rutgers UP, 2018) and The Barbara Johnson Reader (Duke UP, 2014) and the monograph Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). Dr. Valens’s next book project is a study of cookbooks, national culture, and independence movements in the Caribbean. Dr. Valens received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 2004.
Jean M. Vallejo González, University of Puerto Rico
Jean M. Vallejo González has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus and is currently finishing his M.A. in Comparative Literature at the same University. His research interests focus on the relationship between documentary film, phenomenology and literary theory. Also, he works as editor, essayist and film critic on the blog Revista docuCaribe.
Chantalle F. Verna, Florida International University
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Don Walicek, University of Puerto Rico
Don E. Walicek is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras Campus. He has interests in the areas of sociolinguistics, Caribbean history, and the use of interdisciplinary collaboration and scholarship to address contemporary social problems. He is author of several chapters on social life in Anguilla and co-editor of the volume Guantánamo and American Empire; The Humanities Respond (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). Since 2009 he has acted as Editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso.
Michael K. Walonen, Saint Peter's University<
Michael K. Walonen is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Peter’s University who specializes in world literature and postcolonial studies. He is the author of the books Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Literature, Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism, and Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature, as well as articles that have appeared in journals including Small Axe, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in Travel Writing, African Literature and Culture, and Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad, and in the collections Geocritical Explorations, William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, and Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture.
Iona Wynters Parks, Oglethorpe University
Iona Wynter Parks is Lecturer of French and Core Studies at Oglethorpe University. She engages difference power identity representations in French and English-language literatures (especially Caribbean). Her research looks at constructs of “nature” in diverse cultural and physical environments and the role such representations play in determining how people negotiate their lives in relation to each other and the environment of which they are a part. She is currently working on a “translating Chamoiseau and his environment” project.
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Amanda Zilla, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Amanda Zilla is a second year MPhil Literatures in English candidate at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Her dissertation is entitled "A Narratological Study of the Adaptation of Caribbean Literary Texts into Film and Virtual Reality".
