The Department of Literatures in English (DLIE) announces the award-winning and critically acclaimed Jamaican writer, Dr Sharma Taylor, as Writer-in-Residence for the period of Semester 2, 2024.

The author of the novel, What A Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You (2022) published by Virago Press, UK, Dr Taylor is the winner of the 2020 Queen Mary University of London, Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the 2020 Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award and the inaugural 2019 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize   from Bocas Lit Fest. Her work also won second prize in the 2020 First Novel Prize, organised by Daniel Goldsmith Associates Ltd. Dr Taylor has been short/longlisted for numerous literary prizes and awards, including the recently announced V.S. Prichett Short Story Prize for her story, “The three deaths of Nina Carmichael”. She was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize no less than four times.  Dr Taylor has also been announced as a 2023 Musgrave Medal awardee for Literature in the Bronze category.

A proud UWI graduate and corporate attorney, Dr Taylor holds an LLB and LLM from The UWI, and a PhD in Copyright Law from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. She has received extensive training in creative writing, and as Writer-in-Residence is responsible for the delivery of the Level 2 course, “Creative Writing: Prose Fiction”. The post of Writer-in-Residence is intended to help develop the department’s creative writing programme and provide mentorship for aspiring writers in the UWI undergraduate community.

On March 21, Dr Taylor will read at “Love Affair with Literature”, one of the department’s signature activities. She will be joined on the stage by poet and journalist, Mel Cooke, author of the poetry collection 11/9 (Blouse and Skirt Books, 2008). The event will also feature a special tribute to the late Professor Emeritus, Edward Baugh, directed by Eugene Williams and Carolyn Allen.

“Love Affair” begins at 5.30 p.m. and will be held in the Neville Hall Lecture Theatre (N1), UWI, Mona. It will be preceded by another DLIE signature event, “Poetry Clash”, a poetry competition featuring the performance of unpublished poems, at 2.30 p.m. in the Faculty of Humanities and Education courtyard. All are welcome.

 
West Indian Literature Conference
"Connections"
October 12-14, 2023
Jamaica
 
Caribbean literary and cultural criticism highlights the myriad connections between geography, history, language, identities, culture, and forms of knowledge. From George Lamming reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a metaphor of the colonial relation to Sylvia Wynter highlighting the racialized foundations of Western Humanism, Caribbean writers and critics have invested in what Edouard Glissant calls “a poetics of relation.” This necessary awareness of connections has shaped the annual West Indian Literature Conference’s evolution from its initial focus on Anglophone Caribbean literature toward a Pan-Caribbean focus on literatures in all the languages of the Caribbean and its diasporas. The widening of linguistic and territorial connections has occurred in tandem with disciplinary and interdisciplinary expansion. Film, visual studies, popular music, cultural studies, digital humanism, activism, and performance studies are now routinely included in the conference menu agenda, as are contemporary explorations of Caribbean futurity.
 
With this year’s focus on connections, the 41st West Indian Literature Conference seeks to bring together academics, postgraduate students, creative practitioners, secondary school educators, and the general public to both critically assess the literature and celebrate the scholarly analysis of West Indian (Caribbean) literary artists. This conference gathering also takes the opportunity to recognize the connections between West Indian music and West Indian writing. We honor the life and brilliant cultural criticism of the late Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr (UWI, St. Augustine), and we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Noises in the Blood by Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper (UWI, Mona); and Woman Version by Professor Emeritus Evelyn O’Callaghan (UWI, Cave Hill), two texts that continue to inspire scholars to make new critical connections among gender, music, orality, and literature.
 
Hosted by the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus (Kingston, Jamaica), the 41st annual West Indian Literature Conference invites papers and panel proposals that explore the critical connections in Caribbean literary and cultural studies.
 
Papers can include but are not limited to topics such as:

• Regional, international, and diasporic connections
• Linguistic and cross-cultural relations
• Institutional and disciplinary affiliations
• Noises in the Blood, thirty years later
    > Connecting gender and orality
• Woman Version, thirty years later
   > Connecting music and women’s literary voices
• Digital cartographies and connections
• Environmental and terrestrial connections
• Supernatural and existential connections
• Dialogic conversations
• Literature and history
• Literature, visual culture (film), and graphic representation
• Museums, galleries, archives, and curation
• Culture and criticism
• Sexualities and textualities
• Pedagogy, challenges, and innovations
• Connecting non-Caribbean texts in West Indian contexts
• Indigenous identities, Maroons, and dis/connections to colonizers
• Broken connections
• Treaties, heritages, roots, and the law
• Vibes and spiritual connections
• Performance culture, popular culture
• Non-human and animal connections
• Vernacular culture
• Roots and grassroots cultures
• Points of contagion
• Publishing and industries of dispersal 
• Culinary connections
• Art, activism and community building
 
Individual abstracts: should include presenter’s name and institution, email address, title, and a 250-word abstract.
 
Abstracts for panels: Three-person or four-person panels can be proposed. The chair of the panel should submit a 350-word abstract for the panel, that includes the panelists’ names, email addresses, affiliations, and the panel’s title. We additionally welcome panels dedicated to Cooper’s Noises in the Blood and O’Callaghan’s Woman Version.

The conference will be face to face but will provide opportunities for a limited number of fully online panels to participate.
Abstracts should be emailed to westindianlitconference@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is May 15, 2023.