sx salon 50

Writing the introduction to this, sx salon’s fiftieth issue, at the tail end of a year of transitions (some tragic, some joyful) for the platform and in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Melissa’s catastrophic passage through the Caribbean is a project fraught with challenge, one that feels almost beyond my powers. In a way that I have rarely experienced, words fail me.

And yet, words there must be. And so I turn to Audre Lorde’s reminder that “it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”¹ Lorde’s words evoke most directly the precarities of life as a Black queer woman, and I do not mean to efface that layer of the poem’s significance. Yet they also speak to the history and condition of our region and our people. Born in genocide and enslavement, conceived largely as a web of economic machines to enrich lives lived elsewhere, critically vulnerable to a climate crisis we had only the minutest part in creating, Caribbean nations “were never meant to survive”—but here we are.

And here, too, is sx salon at fifty issues, having survived a year that began with the devastating loss, in February, of our then creative editor, the remarkable poet, translator, editor, and teacher Danielle Legros Georges. (You can read my tribute to Danielle in the introduction to sx salon 48.)² Losing Danielle continues to shadow us, and yet—there is solace to be found as well. I was grateful to be present on 8 October when the forty-third annual West Indian Literature Conference presented a tribute to Caribbean “Women of the Word” who are now among the ancestors, honoring Danielle alongside Velma Pollard, Maryse Condé, and Elizabeth Nunez. 

I am even more grateful to be able to dedicate the Poetry & Prose section of this milestone issue to Danielle’s work and her memory. In preparing this section—jointly curated by our new creative editor, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, and me—we invited submissions from all the writers whose work Danielle had placed in sx salon during her tenure.³ To borrow Keith Jones’s words from his contribution, we hoped to create “an elegy and a conjuring of the complex craft that was Danielle Legros Georges’s profound gift—as poet, as seer, as editor, as translator, as friend.” Everyone responded with generosity and enthusiasm. The nine pieces presented here are the fruit of that warm outpouring and demonstrate more fulsomely than anything I might say how attentive and generative were Danielle’s labors as our creative editor, and how deeply appreciated.

Thus, in community, do we wring solace out of grief. My editorial work at sx salon has always been work in and of community: with the other members of the editorial team, with the larger Small Axe Project, with our contributors, and with our readers. The platform’s very name proposes it as a home for conversation, for the creative and intellectual exchanges that sustain Caribbean community in all its far-flung dimensions. For that reason, we have structured the discussion section of this anniversary issue around a series of interviews and dialogues, starting with my conversation with the founding editor Kelly Baker Josephs about sx salon’s past and future and how we see it situated within the larger project of Caribbean studies. That conversation is followed by three others: first, amílcar peter sanatan speaks with Marsha Massiah about her work as the founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival, an event that has taken place annually since 2019. Then, Shrinagar Francis interviews the Trinbagonian poet and architect Fawzia Muradali Kane on her recent collection Guaracara and its place in the broader trajectory of her work. The Interviews & Dialogues section is rounded out by a conversation between Websder Corneille and Evan Auguste about Auguste’s recent work on the life and legacy of the pioneering Haitian psychiatrist Louis Mars, son of the renowned ethnographer Jean Price-Mars.

And so—in community, navigating together the fraught and familiar space between grief and celebration—the sx salon journey continues. Alongside Roque as creative editor, other new members have joined the editorial team as well: Simone A. James Alexander, who takes over the position of book reviews editor from Ronald Cummings; and Pooja Shah, who joins us in the editorial assistant position vacated by Linzey Corridon.⁴ I’m so grateful for everything that both Ronald and Linzey brought to their sx salon work: creativity, commitment, deep knowledge of Caribbean literary and cultural spheres, plus collegiality and humor. It brings me so much joy to welcome Roque, Simone, and Pooja to our team; I’ll also take this opportunity to thank our other editorial assistant, Grayson Chong, for her unceasingly careful and cheerful labors.

A final note: I will not attempt to summarize here the damage done by Hurricane Melissa or its implications for the several Caribbean nations it affected, including my own home country of Jamaica. Reportage abounds on multiple aspects of the storm, including on the causal links between its ferocity and the escalating climate crisis. Instead, I will issue an invitation: sx salon is embarking on a year-long (at least) project of centering climate change and its ruinous effects on the Caribbean. Please send us your writing—scholarly, creative, and otherwise: narratives and reflections on climate crisis; on droughts, hurricanes and flooding; on dangerous heatwaves and disappearing coastlines; and above all, on Caribbean ways of survivance in the face of this existential threat.⁵

In community, and with gratitude for you all,

Rachel L. Mordecai

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Table of Contents

Interviews & Dialogues

“‘Here, we center us’: sx salon at 50 Issues”—Kelly Baker Josephs and Rachel L. Mordecai

“Decolonizing Literature and Literary Festivals: An Interview with Marsha Massiah”—amílcar peter sanatan

“A River Most Foul: An Interview with Fawzia Muradali Kane”—Shrinagar Francis

“‘Heal a population still reeling from enslavement and violence’: The Legacy of Dr. Louis Mars”—Websder Corneille and Evan Auguste

Poetry & Prose—In Memoriam Danielle Legros Georges

“Writing Haiti and the Caribbean Present: Tribute to Danielle Legros Georges”—amílcar peter sanatan

“Learning to Swim”—Keisha-Gaye Anderson

“water children”—Morgan Christie

“Maman: A Cycle for Danielle Legros Georges” —J. R. Lee

“With Keen Eyes”—Omega Francis

“blessed are the Lovergirls” and “Note #888, ad infinitum”—Letitia Marie Pratt

“Hostage (for Danielle Legros Georges)”—Malica S. Willie

“river-misery” (poems in translation)—Conor Bracken

“Morning’s Avalanche of Light”—Keith Jones

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[1] Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” (1978) in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton, 1997), 256.

[2] Rachel L. Mordecai, introduction to sx salon 48, https://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/issues/sx-salon-48 

[3] See “Welcome Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, New sx salon Creative Editor,” sx blog, 8 September 2025, https://smallaxe.net/content/1362.

[4] See “The Small Axe Project Welcomes Simone Alexander,” sx blog, 27 October 2025, https://smallaxe.net/content/1365.

[5] Survivance is a term attributed to the Native American scholar Gerald Vizenor and is defined as combining survival and resistance.