Nina Serrano is an American poet, writer, storyteller, and independent media producer who lives in Vallejo, California. She is the author of Heart Songs: The Collected Poems of Nina Serrano (1980) and Pass it on!: How to start your own senior storytelling program in the schools (Stagebridge). Her poems are widely anthologized, including the literary anthology, Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Writers from California, and three anthologies of peace poems edited by Mary Rudge from Estuary Press. She has also translated two chapbooks from Peruvian poet Adrian Arias. She currently leads storytelling workshops at senior centers and elementary schools through Stagebridge.org. She is the former director of the San Francisco Poetry in the Schools program and the Bay Area's Storytellers in the Schools program. A Latina activist for social justice, women's rights, and the arts.
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels – Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon's Arms (2007) – and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk (2001) often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University during the academic year.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
The University of the Virgin Islands is a public historically black land-grant university in the United States Virgin Islands.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (2004).
Pamela Claire Mordecai is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, short story writer, scholar and anthologist who lives in Canada.
Jamaican literature is internationally renowned, with the island of Jamaica being the home or birthplace of many important authors. One of the most distinctive aspects of Jamaican literature is its use of the local dialect — a variation of English, the country's official language. Known to Jamaicans as "patois", and now sometimes described as "nation language", this creole has become an important element in Jamaican fiction, poetry and theater.
Peepal Tree Press is a publisher based in Leeds, England which publishes Caribbean, Black British, and South Asian fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama and academic books. It was founded after a paper shortage in Guyana halted production of new books in the region, and was named after the sacred peepal trees transplanted to the Caribbean with Indian indentured labourers, after founder Jeremy Poynting heard a story of workers gathering under the tree to tell stories.
Carol Lee Sanchez was a Native American poet, visual artist, essayist, and teacher.
Marion Bethel is an attorney, poet, essayist, filmmaker, human and gender rights activist, and writer from Nassau, The Bahamas.
Devorah Major is an American writer, editor, recording artist, and professor. She has won awards in poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction and is San Francisco's third Poet Laureate.
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU). She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Shola Adisa-Farrar is an American singer and actress with Jamaican descent, currently residing in Paris, France. Adisa-Farrar has performed internationally, and she works as a US Music Ambassador with the US Embassy, Africa Regional Services Department in Paris.
Madwoman is the fourth collection of poetry by Jamaican American poet Shara McCallum. Published in 2017 by Alice James Books, in Madwoman McCallum expands her work to the personal by exploring the difficulties of womanhood, madness, and motherhood. Madwoman's 55 poems use both English and elements of Patwa, the Jamaican creole language she heard people speak while she was growing up in Jamaica. Madwoman won the poetry category of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
Helen Pyne-Timothy was a Jamaican feminist literary critic and academic, who was a founder and the inaugural president of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS), a contributing editor of the journal MaComère, and the author of the 1998 book The Woman, the Writer and Caribbean Society.
Esther Phillips is a Barbadian poet. She became the first poet laureate of Barbados in 2018.
Karen McCarthy Woolf is a poet of English and Jamaican parentage.
