Bartolomé de las Casas, OP was a Spanish clergyman, writer, and activist best known for his work as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman, then became a Dominican friar. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
Mayra Santos-Febres is a Puerto Rican author, poet, novelist, professor of literature, essayist, and literary critic and author of children's books. Her work focuses on themes of race, diaspora identity, female sexuality, gender fluidity, desire, and power. She is a cultural activist who helps to bring books to young readers and the less fortunate. Her writings have been translated into French, English, German, and Italian.
The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB, was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.
Slavery in the Spanish American colonies was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Indigenous peoples were enslaved and their populations decimated. Subsequently enslaved Africans were brought over. Native people were also subjected to forced conversions and conscription.
Caribbean literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region. Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. The more wide-ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or one of numerous creoles.
Marlene Nourbese Philip, usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.
Casa de las Américas is an organization that was founded by the Cuban Government in April 1959, four months after the Cuban Revolution, for the purpose of developing and extending the socio-cultural relations with the countries of Latin America, the Caribbean and the rest of the world. Originally a publishing house and information center, it has developed into the best-known and most prestigious cultural institution in Cuba. The organization awards the Casa de las Américas Prize, in several literary categories, and its official journal, Casa de las Américas, has been published since 1961.
Ana Lydia Vega is a Puerto Rican writer.
Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
Kimberly-Ann Robinson-Walcott is a Jamaican poet and editor. She has been the editor-in-chief of the Jamaica Journal since 2004 and editor-in-chief of the Caribbean Quarterly since 2010. Robinson-Walcott is the author of a study of the white Jamaican novelist Anthony Winkler, called Out of Order! (2006).
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a gay Puerto Rican author, scholar, and performer. He is better known as Larry La Fountain. He has received several awards for his creative writing and scholarship as well as for his work with Latino and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students. He currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he teaches literatures of the Americas, modernism, postmodernism, world literature, and classical and modern theory, and where he has been the recipient of departmental teaching awards and the College Distinguished Service Medal. He has published more than one hundred articles and is the author and editor of a dozen books on the Americas, globalization, world literature, postcolonialism, modernism and literary theory as well as editor of more than twenty special issues of literary periodicals. Kadir’s own poetry and scholarly works have been translated into Greek, Polish, Turkish, French, Arabic, and Spanish.
Italian studies is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the study of the Italian language, literature, art, history, politics, culture and society.
Gordon Rohlehr was a Guyana-born scholar and critic of West Indian literature, noted for his study of popular culture in the Caribbean, including oral poetry, calypso and cricket. He pioneered the academic and intellectual study of Calypso, tracing its history over several centuries, writing a landmark work entitled Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1989), and is considered the world's leading authority on its development.
Jennifer Rahim was a Trinidadian fiction writer, poet and literary critic.
Emilio Jorge Rodríguez is a Cuban essayist and literary critic.
Paulette Ramsay is a Jamaican poet, translator, journalist, novelist, and academic who studies race relations in the Caribbean.
Vera M. Kutzinski is an American academic and researcher who was born in Cuxhaven, Germany, in 1956. Since 2004, she has been the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. Kutzinski also directs the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) project, a collaboration between Vanderbilt and the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Philip Nanton is a Vincentian writer, poet and spoken-word performer, based in Barbados. A sociologist by training, who also teaches cultural studies, he is Honorary Research Associate at the University of Birmingham, and lectures at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. He has been a contributor on Caribbean culture and literature to journals and magazines such as The Caribbean Review of Books, Shibboleths: a Journal of Theory and Criticism and Caribbean Quarterly, and as a spoken-word artist has performed his work at festivals internationally. In 2012, he represented St. Vincent & the Grenadines at Poetry Parnassus in London.
