Issues

Gavin Herbertson is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London, where he focuses on twentieth-century Caribbean literature. He completed his DPhil at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, with a thesis examining points of intersection between writing from the archipelago and Euro-American modernism, with a particular focus on the early poetry and drama of Derek Walcott. His essays on this subject have recently appeared in leading publications in the field of postcolonial studies, including the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of West Indian Literature.

Andrea N. Baldwin is the associate chair of and an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic, Gender, and Disability Studies at the University of Utah. She is an attorney-at-law and also holds a master’s degree in international trade policy, along with a PhD in gender and development studies from the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Nita Barrow Unit, at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus. She is the founder of the Black Feminist Eco Lab at the University of Utah, where her work centers Black and Caribbean feminist thought, ecological justice, and community-engaged scholarship. She is also the host of Standpoints, a Black feminist podcast produced by Virginia Tech Publishing.

Joel Akinwumi is an assistant professor of French and world literature at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. His current research focuses on the depiction of forgetting in African and Caribbean novels. His essays have appeared in Nouvelles Etudes Francophones and Alternative Francophone. He is the winner of the 2021 François-Paré Award for the best paper presented by an emerging scholar at the international conference organized by the Association des Professeures des littératures acadienne et québécoise de l’Atlantique (APLAQA).

Subhalakshmi Gooptu is an assistant professor of world literature at the Fashion Institute of Technology–SUNY. She specializes in postcolonial studies and global histories of labor. She is currently working on a manuscript, “Archives of Reproduction,” that studies literary, visual,and archival representations of indentured women’s labor, reproduction, and resistance.

Ulrike Kistner is Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her teaching and research activities are focused on social theory, psychoanalytic theory, and political philosophy.

Rose Mary Allen has authored, coauthored, and edited numerous books and essays focusing on the cultural and social history of the Dutch Caribbean islands. In 2021, she assumed the role of Extraordinary Professor specializing in culture, community, and history at the University of Curaçao Dr. Moises da Costa Gomez. Most recently, she is a coeditor, with Esther Captain, Matthias van Rossum, and Urwin Vyent, of Slavery and the Dutch State: Dutch Colonial Slavery and Its Afterlives (2025) and, with Sruti Bala, of Handbook of Gender Studies in the Dutch Caribbean(2024).

Yanique Hume is a senior lecturer and the head of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. Her research spans Caribbean cultural thought, Afro-Atlantic spiritualities and mortuary, and Caribbean dance and performance cultures. A priestess in Kongo and Yoruba-based Africana traditions, her scholarship is grounded in embodied knowledge and critical artistic practice. She is the current president of KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and African Diaspora Religions. She is a coeditor, with Aaron Kamugisha, of Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora (2013) and Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics, and Performance (2016); and, with Maarit Forde, of Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean(2018)

Claudine Michel is a scholar of Haitian Vodou who, although not formally initiated, considers herself a Vodouizan à part-entière. She is a founding member of the Congress of Santa Barbara (KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou and African Diaspora Religions), housed since 1997 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is Professor Emerita of Black studies. For over thirty years, she has served as the editor in chief of the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is a coeditor, with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, of Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers (2006) and Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth, and Reality (2006).

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is a university docent at the University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis in literary and cultural analysis, where she teaches Vodou in academic disciplines attached to a still uncritical notion of the “secular.” She also maintains an affiliation with the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education. She is the author of Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (2015), a coeditor of the Journal of Haitian Studies book review section, a former board member of theHaitian Studies Association, and a member of the Albertine Translation.

Cécile Accilien is a scholar of French and francophone studies whose primary research centers on former French, speaking colonies of Africa and the Caribbean, especially Haiti. She considers herself a cultural vodouyizan. She is currently a professor at University of Maryland, College Park, and is the associate editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies. She is a coeditor, with Valérie K. Orlando, of Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (2021), and most recently the author of Bay Lodyans: Haitian Popular Film Culture (2025). She is a former president ofthe Haitian Studies Association.

N. Fadeke Castor is an associate professor of religion and Africana studies at Northeastern University. She is a Black feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with interests in religion, race, and performance. Her first book, Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (2017), won the 2018 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Their work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, The Black Scholar, the Journal of World Popular Music, and Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, among other publications. Her current research focusing on the power of Black sacred ontologies and epistemologies to shape a better world has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences at the School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, NM).

Jerry Philogene is an associate professor in and the director of the Black Studies Program at Middlebury College. She specializes in interdisciplinary American cultural history, art history, and visual arts of the Caribbean and the African diaspora, with an emphasis on the francophone Caribbean. Her publications have appeared in edited collections, peer-reviewed journals, and exhibition catalogues. She received her PhD in American studies at New York University. She is also an independent curator. In 2023, she coorganized, with Katherine Smith, Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition and accompanying catalogue on the contemporary textile works of the Haitian artist Myrlande Constant at the UCLA Fowler Museum. In 2025, she curated Living in Brilliant Suspension (Viv pandye nan briyans): Didier William at Art Yard, Frenchtown, NJ. She is the recipient of a 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her current manuscript, “The Socially Dead and Improbable Citizen: Visualizing Haitian Humanity and Visual Aesthetics.” She is also writing a monograph on the Haitian modernist painter Luce Turnier.

Katherine Smith has held fellowships at Brown University in the History of Art and Architecture Department, and at New York University in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was a curatorial and research associate of Haitian arts at the UCLA Fowler Museum and a lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. She has played a curatorial role in exhibitions of Haitian art at Brown University and UCLA. At the UCLA Fowler Museum, she and Jerry Philogene cocurated the retrospective and co-edited the book Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance (2023), the first major solo exhibition and manuscript devoted to a Haitian woman artist. She publishes regularly in academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogues on Haitian and Caribbean art and religion. Her work draws on her extensive field-work in Haiti carried out intermittently between 2005 and 2018. She is a coeditor, with Leah Gordon, of Freemasonry and the Haitian Imaginary (2026), and is revising a manuscript on death and religious transformation in urban Haiti.

Carine Schermann is a PhD candidate in francophone and Caribbean studies at Florida State University. Her current research focuses on Haitian and Dominican shared imaginaries of shapeshifting and transformation in the common folklore of the island, its literatures, and its visual arts. Her broader intellectual interests encompass Afro-diasporic literatures and visual cultures, racial capitalism, and Black ecologies. She was awarded the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship for the academic year 2023–24, which allowed her to pursue ethnographic work at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as professional training in visual anthropology and documentary filmmaking. For 2025–26, she is the Boston College African and African Diaspora Studies Dissertation Fellow. Her writing is featured in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, and is forthcoming in the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, L’esprit créateur, the Journal of Latino / Latin American Studies, and AWARE: Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions.

Gabrielle Mary Jean-Louis is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching draw on Black feminist theory, Caribbean literature, and digital humanities to foreground the intellectual traditions of women across the Black diaspora. Her dissertation, “Black Feminist Cosmologies: Sacred Grounds in Haitian American Women’s Literature and Visual Culture,” demonstrates how Haitian American creatives theorize spiritual healing and cultural survival through literature, visual art, and digital platforms. Extending methods from visual culture studies and digital humanities, the project highlights how Haitian American women’s cultural production challenges colonial epistemologies while offering a transferable framework for understanding Black feminist survival across the Caribbean and its diaspora. Her scholarship appears in the Journal of Haitian Studies and the Journal of West Indian Literature, and she has digitally published work with the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Caribbean Cultural Institute. She is also the graduate assistant to the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective and the assistant director of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute.

Kyrah Malika Daniels is an assistant professor of African American studies at Emory University. She completed her BA in Africana studies at Stanford University and received her MA in religion and her PhD in African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her first book, Art of the Healing Gods (2026), is a comparative religion project that examines sacred art objects used in healing ceremonies of Haiti and Congo-Kinshasa. Deeply invested in the digital humanities, she curates a student-led research platform called Africana Art Scholars and participates in initiatives such as the UCLA Fowler Museum’s Vital Matters series. Her work has been published in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. She currently serves as a Leadership Council Member for the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association (ADRSA) and as vice president for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (2024), a TIME Best Book of April 2024. Her work has received multiple awards, including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the Guyana Prize in Literature, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Gold Prize, and the Isis Duarte Book Prize. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder (2021), was named a “Best Book of 2021” by National Public Radio, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, The Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize and longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include Spirit of Haiti (2003), The Scorpion’s Claw (2004), and The Loneliness of Angels (2010). She is also the author of several academic books, including Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (1997) and Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters (2023). Recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature, and Lit Hub. She is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College in California.

Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist and a scholar. She is a professor of humanities and the founding director of the Rasanblaj Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is concerned with the visceral in the structural, and her research questions engage geopolitics, aesthetics, ephemerality, and the spiritual in the dailyness of Black diasporic conditions. For three decades, her rasanblaj approach to her multidisciplinary practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She is the author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post Quake Chronicle (2015) and A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics (2023). Her art and writing have appeared in Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, the Journal of Haitian Studies, Meridians, Souls, Transition, and Third Text, and elsewhere, and she has performed at the Gorki Theatre, LaMama, the Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, among other venues. She was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2020) and the Biennale of Dakar in Senegal (2024).

David McKay is a prize-winning translator of fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry, who can be heard reading his work on the YouTube channel Translators Aloud. He is the translator of The Remembered Soldier, by Anjet Daanje (2025), and a co-translator, with Lucy Scott, of Off-White, by the Surinamese Dutch author Astrid Roemer (2024), and, with David Colmer, of Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, by David Van Reybrouck (2024). His translation of Anton de Kom’s We Slaves of Suriname (2022) received an ICM Global South Award. He enjoys collaborating with fellow translators, authors, and other creative professionals such as the Foreign Affairs theater company, and is proud to have mentored a number of exceptional emerging translators for the American Literary Translators Association and other organizations.

David Colmer is an Australian writer, translator, and editor who lives in Amsterdam. He translates novels, poetry, and children’s literature from Dutch and occasionally Frisian and has won several major prizes, including the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker) and Australian and Dutch awards for his body of work. In 2022 he was awarded the James Brockway Prize for his translations of Dutch poetry. His most recent published translations include A Guardian Angel Recalls (2021) by Willem Frederik Hermans and the poetry of Cees Nooteboom, Nachoem M. Wijnberg, and Radna Fabias.

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj (whose work also appears on the covers of this issue) is a contemporary Surinamese artist known for his distinctive paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances. He graduated with honors from the Nola Hatterman Art Institute in 2004. His early work focused on ordinary Surinamese people and their daily lives, while later his themes developed around exploring memory, identity, and the complexities of human nature through vibrant colors and expressive techniques. He gained international recognition with his Flexible Man Project, introduced in 2010, featuring colorful textile sculptures symbolizing Suriname’s and Caribbean multicultural society. This artwork has been exhibited in Suriname, the Netherlands, Washington, DC, Martinique, Aruba, and Trinidad and Tobago, and has appeared in ARC Magazine. He has participated in artist residencies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (2009), Alice Yard (2011), Cité Internationale des Arts (2016), and DVCAI Studio in Miami (2026). His 2.8–meter sculpture Anansi is part of the permanent collection of the Suriname Museum.

Matthew Chin an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Emory University. He is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research engages feminist and queer histories of race across the Caribbean and Asia. His book Fractal Repair: Making Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024) was a cowinner of the John Boswell Prize by the LGBTQ History Association and received a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and an honorable mention for the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Prize by the CaribbeanStudies Association. His work has been published in journals such as Globalizations, Interventions, and Public Culture.

Preity R. Kumar is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (2024), which introduces “affective violence” as a key concept, reconceptualizing violence beyond physical harm to encompass the emotional, psychological, and embodied ways queer women navigate and reproduce harm within a heteropatriarchal society. Through this framework, she reveals how violence operates not only as an external force but as an intimate and affective structure shaping queer existence, desire, and survival. Her research has been published in international journals and volumes across the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and Poland, including the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies, the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, and the Routledge Companion to Applied Qualitative Research in the Caribbean (2025).

Nikoli A. Attai received his PhD in women’s and gender studies from the University of Toronto and an M Phil in cultural studies and a BA in media and communication from the University of the West Indies. He is most recently the author of Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023) and a coeditor, with Sue Ann Barratt, of Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque (2026). His broader research focuses on queer experiences in the anglophone Caribbean beyond notions of disease and violence, and the need to flee the region. He also investigates international queer asylum interventions in Canada and the Netherlands, and decolonial cultural formations in Trinidad and Tobago and the anglophone Caribbean.

Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan