Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 25 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973), and Blubber (1974). Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Susan Hughes is a Canadian author of children's books. She is a freelance editor and writer. She provides manuscript evaluation and coaching services for writers.
Olive Marjorie Senior is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story and non-fiction writer based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She was awarded the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005 by the Institute of Jamaica for her contributions to literature. Senior was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2021.
William Heinemann Ltd., with the imprint Heinemann, was a London-based publisher founded in 1890 by William Heinemann. Their first published book, 1890's The Bondman, was a huge success in the United Kingdom and launched the company. He was joined in 1893 by Sydney Pawling. Heinemann died in 1920 and Pawling sold the company to Doubleday, having worked with them in the past to publish their works in the United States. Pawling died in 1922 and new management took over. Doubleday sold his interest in 1933.
Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Corinne Demas is the award winning author of five novels, two collections of short stories, a collection of poetry, a memoir, two plays, and numerous books for children. She has published more than fifty short stories in a variety of magazines and literary journals. Her publications before 2000 are under the name Corinne Demas Bliss.
Alice Low was an American author, lyricist, and editor. Over the course of a 60-year career she wrote more than 25 books for children, edited five anthologies, and wrote the book and lyrics for a musical based on one of her books.
Leone Ross FRSL is a British novelist, short story writer, editor, journalist and academic, who is of Jamaican and Scottish ancestry.
James Berry, OBE, Hon. FRSL, was a Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often "explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards". As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
Tiphanie Yanique from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, is a Caribbean American fiction writer, poet and essayist who lives in New York. In 2010 the National Book Foundation named her a "5 Under 35" honoree. She also teaches creative writing, currently based at Emory University.
Margaret Yvonne Busby,, Hon. FRSL, also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison (1944–2011) co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa (1992), and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, Busby was named as president of English PEN.
Charlotte H. Bruner was an American scholar who was one of the first in the United States to write extensively about, and translate the work of, African women writers. She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.
Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian writer of Afro-Caribbean descent, whose work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry. She is the author of over 14 books for children and adults.
Joan Anim-Addo is a Grenadian-born academic, poet, playwright and publisher, who is Emeritus Professor of Caribbean Literature and Culture in the English and Creative Writing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Robyn Marie Sheahan-Bright is an Australian author, editor and publisher of, and on, children's literature and publishing itself.
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman's Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited. Her pioneering school anthology, The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), drew on her use of local literary material while teaching in Jamaica. A participant in and chronicler of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Walmsley is also the author of The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966–1971 (1992) and Art in the Caribbean (2010). She lives in London.
Joanne C. Hillhouse is a creative writer, journalist, producer and educator from Antigua and Barbuda. Her writing encompasses novels, short stories, poetry and children's books, and she has contributed to many publications in the Caribbean region as well as internationally, among them the anthologies Pepperpot (2014) and New Daughters of Africa (2019). Hillhouse's books include the poetry collection On Becoming (2003), the novellas The Boy from Willow Bend (2003) and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight (2004), the children's books Fish Outta Water and With Grace, the novel Oh Gad! (2012), and the young adult novel Musical Youth (2014), which was runner-up for the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. She was named by Literary Hub as one of "10 Female Caribbean Authors You Should Know". An advocate for the development of the arts in Antigua and Barbuda, she founded the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize in 2004.
Jane Bryce is a British writer, journalist, literary and cultural critic, as well as an academic. She was born and raised in Tanzania, has lived in Italy, the UK and Nigeria, and since 1992 has been based in Barbados. Her writing for a wide range of publications has focused on contemporary African and Caribbean fiction, postcolonial cinema and creative writing, and she is Professor Emerita of African Literature and Cinema at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.
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.
