SX Blog

Small Axe is happy to announce that Dantaé Elliott, Tyler Grand Pre and Mayaki Kimba will be joining our team as editorial assistants as of 1 September 2022. We look forward to their creative contributions to the work we do. 

Dantaé Elliott is a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. She has a particular interest in contemporary Caribbean Art and its relation to migration within the Caribbean diaspora and region, while examining the phenomenon “barrel children syndrome.” To highlight migratory remittance and the relationship between a material object, that not only carries personal and emotional significance, but facilitates interpersonal interactions. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a concentration in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) from Roanoke College and a M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature with a focus on Golden Age Literature in Spain from the University of Delaware. She is also the program assistant for the Caribbean Initiative workshop series at the Center for Caribbean and Latin American Studies at NYU. She is currently serving as Co-Facilitator for the CCCADI (Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute) Summer Seminar for their Curatorial Fellowship class of 2022/2023. She is a featured artist in Volume 4 of Forgotten Lands, titled Currents of Africa, released in June 2022. 

Tyler Grand Pre is a Ph.D student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and ICLS affiliate at Columbia University. Within the scope of both African diasporic and, particularly, Caribbean literature and culture, his research revolves around poetic responses to the infrastructure of race—that is, the networks of technologies, materials, and representational practices that structure the social, economic and spatial hierarchies of race. Tyler therefore examines the way different writers and artists respond to the built and mapped environment to reimagine community both within and without the borders of language, race, and geography. Before earning his MA and MPhil in his current department at Columbia University, Tyler received a BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he double majored in English as well as French and francophone studies. He is therefore interested in translation studies and has translated between French and English for Routledge as well as the NGO Women’s Global Education Project. Tyler regularly teaches UW classes for the Undergraduate Writing Program themed around human rights and is leading a section of the course Literary Texts, Critical Methods for the English department this Fall (2022). 

Mayaki Kimba is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, specializing in political theory. His research interests concern the legacy of empire in shaping ideas around race and migration in twentieth-century Western Europe. Other and related interests include Black political thought, anticolonial political thought, (social) citizenship and the welfare state. He was born and raised in the Netherlands, and graduated with a B.A. in political science from Reed College in May 2020. His essay on T. H. Marshall, late imperial ideology and racialized migrant exclusion was selected for a 2020 award by the Undergraduate Essay Prize Committee of the North American Conference on British Studies.