Author Esther Phillips

Her first collection of poems, “La Montee,” appeared in chapbook form and was published by the University of the West Indies in 1983. Her second collection, “When Ground Doves Fly,” was published in 2003 by Ian Randle Publishers.  For this work she won the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award. In 2009, Peepal Tree Press published her next poetry collection, “The Stone Gatherer.”

Her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies in the Caribbean, the USA and the UK. These include “The Whistling Bird: Caribbean Women Writers” and “Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad.”

Ms.Phillips is Head of the Division of Liberal Arts at the Barbados Community College and is a member of the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Committee. She founded Writers Ink Barbados and is editor of BIM: Arts for the 21st Century. Her column “Word Vie” appears bi-weekly in the Sunday Sun, the Nation Newspaper (Barbados).

Author Jason Cole

He is also a talented magician, which helps greatly in his current role as a pre-school instructor. He will be using this skill at the Festival when he participates in the Children’s Reading Convocation and the Children’s Tent at the Festival Village.

He has published four children’s books, based on the personalities of the 2 to 4-year old children he encounters daily. The books, “Cricket is My Game,” “Learning to Surf,” “Me and Max” and “Butterflies, Beetles and Bugs,” have received many awards.

Author Verna Wilkins

She is also the author of 30 children’s books and seven biographies for young adults. Verna’s mission was to redress the balance in publishing by giving a high positive profile to children from ethnic minorities and those with disabilities. This is done unselfconsciously with engaging and enjoyable stories and stunning illustrations. All Tamarind stories, including the biographies, offer positive role models for success. Many of the books feature on the National Curriculum and on children’s television. Tamarind titles have also been chosen among the Children’s Books of the Year. Wilkins was born in Grenada, and served as a lecturer in English and business programs before founding Tamarind.

Author Pam Grier

She was nominated for a Golden Globe and an NAACP Image Award for her performance in “Jackie Brown.” Always an image leader, Grier was the first Black woman to appear on the cover of MS Magazine (August 1975 issue), named one of Ebony Magazine’s “100 Most Fascinating Women of the 20th Century,” and awarded a Career Achievement Award at the 34th Annual Chicago International Film Festival.

Author Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison was born and educated in Kingston, Jamaica, where she began publishing her early works. While writing, she felt painting was her true creative outlet, and she studied the art at the Jamaica School of Art and then at the School of the Art Student’s League in New York. To earn a living, she worked in advertising and public relations and taught at Jamaica College and St. Andrew High School.

Her first collection of poems, “Tamarind Season,” was published in 1980 and met with critical acclaim. She has published eight collections of poetry and two collections of short prose stories. Her newest publications include a book of short prose fiction stories entitled “Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah” (2005) and a collection of poetry entitled “Controlling the Silver” (2005).

Goodison is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica (1999), and has also received favorable criticism as a reader/performer. Her work appears in the “Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces” and other international anthologies, such as the “HarperCollins World Reader” and the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry.”

She has lived in the United States and taught as a visiting fellow at the University of Michigan (1992), Radcliffe University (1991), and, in Canada, the University of Toronto (1991). She currently lives part-time on the North Coast of Jamaica, where she writes and part-time in the United States, where she works as an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the department of English and at the Center for African American Studies. She is also a member of the Jamaican National Commission to UNESCO.

Author Zee Edgell

Zee Edgell was born and grew up in Belize City, Belize. One of her first jobs (in the early 1960s) was as a reporter on The Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966-1968 she taught at St Catherine Academy and worked as the editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. She has lived in Jamaica, Britain, Afghanistan, Nigeria,  Bangladesh and Somalia.  In the early 1980s she returned to Belize to teach and served as the Director of the Women’s Bureau in the Government of Belize (1981-82) and later as the Director of the Department of Women’s Affairs (1986-87). Zee lectured at the University College of Belize from 1988-1989, and was a Visiting Writer in the Department of English at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia in the USA in 1993. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Kent State University in Ohio, USA.

Her first novel, “Beka Lamb”(Heinemann 1982)  was awarded the 1982 Fawcett Society Book Prize. Edgell’s short story, “My Uncle Theophilus,” won The Canute A. Brodhurst Prize for short fiction and was published in The Caribbean Writer in 1999. She has also had published “In Times Like These” (Heinemann 1991), “The Festival of San Joaquin” (Heinemann 1997) and “Time and the River” (Harcourt/Heinemann 2007). In 2007, Zee was received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II for her “services to literature and to the community.”  In January, 2008, Zee was awarded the Sister Mary McCauley Award, from St. Catherine Academy, Belize City, Belize.

She juggles her work as a freelance writer, editor, journalist, and producer with her creative writing pursuits. She’s the author of “The Boy from Willow Bend” and “Dancing Nude in the Moonlight,” both initially published by Macmillan. The former was hailed by Caribbean critics as “well crafted lively and absolutely believable” and “a story of the triumph of spirit over situation”. Now part of the schools’ reading list in Antigua and Barbuda, it was reissued by Hansib in 2009. In addition to publishing new material, the author has plans to re-issue “Dancing Nude in the Moonlight,” which the Antigua and Barbuda Review of Books described as “sensitive, sensuous, and well nuanced” and the Caribbean Writer dubbed “lyrical, sensual, and gentle”.

Hillhouse’s creative writing, poetry, and fiction have also been published in Calabash, The Caribbean Writer, Tongues of the Ocean, Sea Breeze, Ma Comère, Mythium, and elsewhere. She’s participated in various literary forums including the prestigious Breadloaf Writers Conference as an international fellow.

Her ‘day job’ involves writing for various publications and consulting with nonprofit and corporate clients on projects ranging from scripting documentaries and public service announcements to editing magazines and web content; also fellow authors for whom she’s provided book editing services.

Hillhouse’s pet projects, meanwhile, include the Cushion Club with which she’s volunteered for several years and the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize which she co-founded in 2004. She currently leads an online writers group at the Caribbean Literary Salon. She has been honored by UNESCO for her contributions to literacy and the literary arts in Antigua and Barbuda.

For more information, see www.jhohadli.com or look her up, www.facebook.com/jhohadli, where you can also join The Boy from Willow Bend page, or www.myspace.com/jhohadli where she maintains a book blog discussing works by other authors.

Author Grace Nichols

She worked as a teacher and journalist and, as part of a Diploma in Communications at the University of Guyana, spent time in some of the most remote areas of Guyana, a period that influenced her writings and initiated a strong interest in Guyanese folk tales, Amerindian myths and the South American civilisations of the Aztec and Inca. She has lived in the UK since 1977.

Her first poetry collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, was published in 1983. The book won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and a subsequent film adaptation of the book was awarded a gold medal at the International Film and Television Festival of New York. The book was also dramatised for radio by the BBC. Subsequent poetry collections include The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1984), Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman (1989), and Sunris (1996). She also writes books for children, inspired predominantly by Guyanese folklore and Amerindian legends, including Come on into My Tropical Garden (1988) and Give Yourself a Hug (1994). Everybody Got A Gift (2005) includes new and selected poems, and her collection, Startling the Flying Fish (2006), contains poems which tell the story of the Caribbean.

Her latest adult collection is Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). The Fat Black Women’s Poems (2009).

Author Elizabeth Nunez

Dr. Nunez is the award-winning author of six novels: Prospero’s Daughter; Grace; Discretion; Bruised Hibiscus; Beyond the Limbo Silence; and When Rocks Dance.  Prospero’s Daughter, her most recent novel, was a March 2006 Editor’s Choice in the New York Times. The Times calls Nunez “a master of pacing and plotting,” and says that Prospero’s Daughter is “gripping and richly imagined.” Prospero’s Daughter was named 2006 Best Novel of the Year by Black Issues Book Review and was the 2006 One Book, One Community selection for the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, celebrated at the 2006 Miami International Literary Festival. Bruised Hibiscus won a 2001 American Book Award, Discretion was short-listed for the 2003 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Beyond the Limbo Silence won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award in the multicultural category.  In its review of Nunez’s novel Grace, Publisher’s Weekly says that the prose is “exquisitely tuned” and that the narrative unfolds with “understated elegance.” The Seattle Times comments that “Discretion delivers two memorable characters whose personal culture clashes, both shared and internalized, are as telling as those of the world they inhabit.”  Black Issues Book Review describes Bruised Hibiscus as “moving, powerful and haunting” and Booklist says of Beyond the Limbo Silence that Nunez has a writing style that “will remind many Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.”  Beyond the Limbo Silence was also picked by the Washington Post as one of the best books of 1998.

Dr. Nunez is co-editor with Jennifer Sparrow of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad and author of several monographs of literary criticism, with emphasis on Caribbean literature. She is a former fellow of Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies.  A cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference, and director from 1986-2000, Nunez received grant awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as grants from The Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Reed Foundation for these conferences.  She is executive producer of the 2004 NY Emmy-nominated CUNY TV series Black Writers in America. Her audiobooks include Grace and Prospero’s Daughter (BBC/America) and Discretion (Recorded Books). For more information, visit Nunez’s website, www.elizabethnunez.com.

Author John Agard

He worked for the Guyana Sunday Chronicle newspaper as sub-editor and feature writer before moving to England in 1977, where he became a touring lecturer for the Commonwealth Institute, traveling to schools throughout the UK to promote a better understanding of Caribbean culture. In 1993 he was appointed Writer in Residence at the South Bank Centre, London, and became Poet in Residence at the BBC in London, an appointment created as part of a scheme run by the Poetry Society in London. He also played a key role in the ‘Windrush’ season of programmes in 1998. He won the Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry in 1997 and has travelled extensively throughout the world performing his poetry.

His published poetry includes Man to Pan (1982), winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize, Limbo Dancer in Dark Glasses (1983), Mangoes and Bullets: Selected and New Poems 1972-84 (1985) and Weblines (2000). He is also the author of many children’s books, including Lend Me Your Wings (1987), which was shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. He has contributed to, and edited, several anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse (1986), and is also co-editor of A Caribbean Dozen (1994) with his partner, the poet Grace Nichols, with whom he also co-wrote No Hickory, No Dickory, No Dock in 1991. Their latest collaboration is From Mouth to Mouth (2004), an anthology of poems handed down from all over the world.

John Agard lives in south-east England. His latest poetry collection is We Brits (2006),
shortlisted for the 2007 British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year award.