Issues

Belinda Edmondson is an associate professor of English and chair of African American/African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is currently working on a study of Caribbean culture tentatively titled “Anxieties of Influence: The Emergence of Middlebrow Culture in the Caribbean.”

Winston James teaches history at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (1998), which won the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship, and A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion (2000). He is the editor (with Clive Harris) of Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (1993). He is currently working on a manuscript titled “Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik, 1889–1923.”

Loretta Collins is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. She teaches anglophone Caribbean literature and film, creative writing, and performance studies. She has published articles on Caribbean literature and popular culture and is currently editing a collection of essays on Caribbean performance poetry and music in the Canadian and US context.

Obika Gray is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He is the author of Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica (1991) and has written widely on social movements and on the politics of the urban poor in Jamaica. He is completing a manuscript titled “Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor.”

Patricia Saunders is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College, Brunswick. Her research interests include Caribbean women’s literature, and Caribbean popular culture and national identity. Her work has appeared in The Bucknell Review, Plantation Society in the Americas, and Calabash. She is currently completing a manuscript titled “Disciplining Discourse, Re(in)forming Fiction: Caribbean Literature and the Task of Translating Identity.”

Wigmoore Francis is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of History, University of the West Indies, Mona. His areas of interest include intellectual history, theory and methodologies of history, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Ifeona Fulani is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing and is the author of a novel, Seasons of Dust, and numerous short stories. She teaches writing in New York City.

Robert Edison Sandiford is a writer whose work has appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Globe and Mail, Calabash, Paramour, and The Comics Journal, among other publications. He is the author of Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Stories (1995) and two comic collections, Attractive Forces (1997) and Stray Moonbeams (2002).

John Robbert Lee has published several collections of poetry, most recently Artefacts: Collected Poems (2000). His short stories and poems have been widely anthologized in, for example, The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories (1990) and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English (1986). His reviews and columns have appeared with regularity in newspapers, and he has also produced and presented radio and television programs in St. Lucia.

Cyril Dabydeen is a poet and short story writer teaching at the University of Ottawa. Among his many books are the short story collections Black Jesus and Other Stories (1997), My Brahmin Days (2000), and North of the Equator(2001), and the novels Dark Swirl (1989), The Wizard Swami (1989), and (for young adults) Sometimes Hard (1994).

Cyril Dabydeen is a poet and short story writer teaching at the University of Ottawa. Among his many books are the short story collections Black Jesus and Other Stories (1997), My Brahmin Days (2000), and North of the Equator(2001), and the novels Dark Swirl (1989), The Wizard Swami (1989), and (for young adults) Sometimes Hard (1994).

Cyril Dabydeen is a poet and short story writer teaching at the University of Ottawa. Among his many books are the short story collections Black Jesus and Other Stories (1997), My Brahmin Days (2000), and North of the Equator(2001), and the novels Dark Swirl (1989), The Wizard Swami (1989), and (for young adults) Sometimes Hard (1994).

Curdella Forbes is a lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She has published criticism on Caribbean literature and Shakespeare in Small Axe and elsewhere, and is also the author of a collection of short stories, Songs of Silence (2002).

Harold Mcdermott is senior vice principal at the Morant Bay High School, St. Thomas, Jamaica. For the 2002–2003 academic year he is serving as assistant lecturer in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona, where he is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on Derek Walcott’s poetics.