Xan-Xi Bethel is a product of the Simmons-Hall families from Middle Caicos in the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Bonamy-Munnings-Woodside families of Andros and Cat Island in the Bahamas. She also comes out of the Sands, Adderley, Benebee, and Bethel families of Eleuthera and Long Island in the Bahamas. These were families that held fast to notions of belonging, nation building, and service. They were an industrious and ambitious people who worked and contributed as farmers, educators, scholars, sailors, businesspeople, suffragettes, and adventurers. These were innovators—defined by an unwavering thirst for knowledge and a desire to build and create. It is a legacy of excellence on which Xan-Xi stands—a child of resolute and striving people.

She has always been an avid lover of literature. As a child Xan-Xi stayed up reading into the wee hours of the morning. In high school, Xan-Xi’s writing skills flourished under Terrance Pratt’s tutelage. This was a most exciting time for her—for learning, for reading, and for writing. She particularly enjoyed finding ever more ingenious ways to hand hastily written essays in to Mr. Pratt, and his subsequent (unintentional) hilarious responses. On one occasion she secretly stuck the paper to the windshield of Mr. Pratt’s car and watched with bated breath as he tried to drive away before noticing the leaves fluttering gaily in the breeze.

Xan-Xi’s parents were also pivotal in her life. Her father used to make her stand and listen to his essays. He’d also engage her in long discussions about literature, politics, civic duty. These lessons informed Xan-Xi’s drive for success, and her desire to teach and be in service to her community.

Taking the long and winding route to her degree, the past ten years of Xan-Xi’s life have been about excitement. But she shares that with age, experience, and responsibility, her goals and dreams have shifted and are now wrapped up in a deep desire to see radical change in her community. She asserts that literature is like magic, in that it is unique and remarkable in that it exists and flourishes at the intersection of art, politics, resistance, history, and culture. Literature has the capacity to capture the very soul of our-selves, and read it back to us, unapologetic and proud. She dreams of being one of those “make-plenty-trouble” type of teachers that fosters a love of literature and a love of life in her students.

Xan-Xi’s writing has been featured in several publications over the years, including “A Sudden and Violent Change” in 2009, curated by Sonia Farmer; Nicolette Bethel’s online publication Tongues of the Ocean, and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas’ 2019 National Exhibit. She was also the winner of the inaugural Tiffany Austin Poetry Competition facilitated by the Blue Flamingo Literary Festival in 2019 and was the 2020 winner of the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize facilitated by the University of Kentucky’s literary journal, the New Limestone Review. 
In 2021 she was awarded a First-Class Honours Bachelor of Arts Degree in Literatures in English with minors in History and Cultural Studies. She is currently enrolled in the MPhil/PhD Literatures in English programme at The UWI, Mona.
She describes herself as a radical optimist.