About the authors

Rhoda Arrindell is the head of the Language Division of the University of St. Martin and is the instructor of English Composition, Caribbean Literature, and Elements of Literature. In 2003, the current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Puerto Rico conducted the the Creative Writing Process class for the six-month Creative Writing Program of House of Nehesi Publishers. Arrindell holds a master’s degree in education administration (University of the Virgin Islands), a BA in linguistics (Syracuse University), and aPropaedeuse (pre-law) Diploma (University of the Netherlands Antilles). From 1994 to 1998, Arrindell was the coordinator for Turning Point Foundation — responsible for its drug prevention educational programs. In the late 1990s, she was a copy editor for The Chronicle and coordinated the Youth Summit for the island government in Great Bay (Philipsburg). Arrindell has presented scholarly papers on St. Martin literature and language at regional conferences. She is the founder of the United Volleyball Club Youth Program and is the mother of two.

Author’s Book Details

Language, Culture, and Identity in St. Martin
by Rhoda Arrindell

Paperback, literature, 240 pp.

ISBN: 978-0988825-22-2

$20

Arrindell’s research is a unique groundbreaking work.
– Dr. Alma Simounet, University of Puerto Rico

Brother Rich, Nana Sweetie
Creative Writing in St. Martin
Edited by Rhoda Arrindell

Paperback, fiction, short stories; poetry, 72 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-84-8

This collection is the result of a demanding writing course and is tangibly in line with the tradition of claiming one selves and of inviting others to listen.
– Dr. Aart G. Broek, author, literary historian

$15  Book Reviews

Fabian Adekunle Badejo was born in Nigeria in 1950. He attended the Government College Ibadan, Nigeria, and obtained a Master’s degree in Hispanic Literature from the University of Navarra, Spain. The former Nigerian diplomat has made St. Martin his home since 1981. He is deeply involved with the cultural and social life of the island and its people, and has done extensive writing on politics, business and current affairs, and on the nation’s artists and artistic life. During his term as director of the St. Maarten Council on the Arts in the early 1980s, he was the motor behind the landmark arts festival SMAFESTAC. The author of Claude ­ A Portrait of Power, first published in 1989, and Salted Tongues ­ Modern Literature in St.Martin (2003) also wrote profiles for St. Martin Massive! A Snapshot on Popular Artists (2000), and served as a consultant for GEBE Through The Years ­ Power To Serve (2006). His paper, “Negritude in the forgotten territories: Lasana Sekou and Aimé Césaire,” was presented at the Senghor Colloquium (UWI-Cave Hill) in 2006. Badejo has produced concerts by kaisonian Mighty Dow and humorists/storytellers Paul Keens Douglas and Fernando Clark. He has directed plays, monologues and film documentaries in St. Martin and abroad; and presented scholarly papers on the island’s literature and publishing at regional conferences. Between 1989 and 2008, Badejo has been the managing director/editor, publisher, news director, and editor respectively of The St. Maarten Guardian, St. Martin Business Week, and Todaynewspapers and avsnewsonline.com. For over twenty years, Badejo has produced and hosted the PJD2 radio talkshow Culture Time.

Author’s Book Details

Claude – A Portrait of Power
by Fabian Badejo

Paperback, biographical survey, political studies, 200 pp.

ISBN: 978-0913441-38-1

“Anybody who can last for thirty-five years in government has my unstinted admiration,” declared former US Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, on the occasion of Dr. Claude Wathey’s 35th anniversary in elected public office in St. Martin. According to Badejo, history will not only weigh what this Caribbean political strongman “has done for the island, … nor how well he was liked or disliked” but “what he may have failed to do, too.”

$20  Book Reviews

 

Salted Tongues – Modern Literature in St. Martin
by Fabian Adekunle Badejo

Paperback, literature, essays, 72 pp., 5.25” x 8”
ISBN: 0-913441-62-7

In this book of three essays, wonderfully entitled Salted Tongues, Fabian Adekunle Badejo has contributed significantly to filling a gap in Caribbean literature and widen the scope about the authors of modern writing and the role of language, publishing and literary criticism in St. Martin.
– Dr. Wim Rutgers, Literary historian, University of Aruba

$15Book Reviews

Amiri Baraka was born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA. The author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, Baraka is a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Theophilus Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renown as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics. The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu. Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003). The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors. The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate because of Somebody Blew Up America’sprovocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines of the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade Center bombings in 2001. The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to be featured on CNN–to name a few US city, state and national and international media. Baraka lives in Newark with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some fifteen years. His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

Author’s Book Details

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems
by Amiri Baraka

Paperback, Poetry/Literature, 57 pp., 5″ x 7.5″

ISBN: 0-913441-72-4

4th printing by popular demand!

The publication of Amiri Baraka’s Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems makes one more mark in the development in modern Black radical & revolutionary cultural reconstruction.
– Kamau Brathwaite, CowPastor, Barbados;Comparative Lit., New York University

$15  Book Reviews

Marion Bethel is a poet, short story writer, essayist and attorney from The Bahamas. A Cambridge University graduate, Bethel’s writings have appeared in Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Lignum Vitae and The Caribbean Writer; and anthologized inJunction, From The Shallow Seas, and Moving Beyond Boundaries. The James Michener and Harvard University fellow has been a guest writer at the Miami International Book Fair, the Caribbean Women Writers Series, Duke University, the International Poetry Festival of Medellin, the International Writers Workshop, Hong Kong, the St. Martin Book Fair and the International Poetry Festival of Granada. Bethel is a winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for Guanahaní, Mi Amor y otros poemas, which has been published in Spanish by Casa.

Author’s Book Details

Guanahani, My Love
by Marion Bethel

Paperback, poetry, literature 72 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-96-1

What is interesting about these poems is that they … become entries into Caribbean magical realism.
– Kamau Brathwaite, New York University

$15  Book Reviews

 

Joan M. Bharath was born in Arima, Trinidad and Tobago. Uniquely,her maiden voyage and love for travel began with Caribbean destinations in the early 1960s ­ while working for the audit and fraud detection units of the government’s Inland Revenue Department. In the late 1960s, neither her position as tax department manager for a private accounting firm, nor her role as a new wife and mother would ground her travels. In 1993, Bharath started Taxation Services and had already traveled around the world. With her certified taxation business, Bharath conducts annual seminars on corporate and individual tax returns. A certified master of Karuna Reiki, a Japanese art of natural healing, her hobbies include aerobics and weight-training, and she maintains a bio-life dietary program, “geared towards optimizing health, maximizing life, and preventing disease.” Bon Voyage ­ 40 Years of Travel is her first book. Bharath has four children and two grandchildren and lives in Trinidad with her husband.

Author’s Book Details

Bon Voyage – 40 Years of Travel
by Joan M. Bharath

Paperback, travel, tourism; full color photos, 203 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-64-3

Join Joan and her travel-happy Bharath family through 40 years of travel. Island-hop in the Caribbean. Splash around the Pacific Ocean. See the pyramids and take a camel ride in Egypt. Would you prefer snow-capped mountains, or a boat ride in Alaska? How about honeymooning in Tobago and renewing marriage vows over 20 years later in the Holy Land? Moscow Olympics for two? What about taking the whole family on a budget bash to Disney World? You might find out that you are as fascinated by New York City bridges and “Trini ole talk” in Canada as by bridging cultures on a European vacation and waltzing in Vienna under starry skies. You are bound to have a bon voyage in this never-ending story of personal and family travels around this fascinating world.

$25  Book Reviews

Robin Boasman was born in Philipsburg, St. Martin, and received her B.A. in education from the University of St. Martin. During her studies she worked as a tutor, assisting children with their homework and remedial lessons. Boasman currently teaches at the Sister Magda Primary School. According to Boasman, “it is highly important for children to read, but children will more likely read when they enjoy and can relate to what they are reading. This is how the story of Lizzy Lizard came about.” Robin Boasman is a mother and Lizzy Lizard is her first book.

 

Author’s Book Details

Lizzy Lizzard
by Robin Boasman

$20

ISBN: 978-0988825-21-5

Lizzy Lizard is Robin Boasman’s darling contribution to the children’s literature of the Caribbean. What an absolute delight to get the grand tour of St. Martin with Lizzy Lizardand her new friends! – Jamie Alleyne, Learning & Child Development Consultant

Little Lizzy Lizard’s Long walk quickly turns into an adventure in and around St. Martin’s busiest city. The book’s photo art illustrations convey a sense of magic to places easily identified by boys and girls, ages 4 to 9. Meet the endearing Suzy Soldier Crab, Iggy iguana, Missy Mongoose, and Pico Pelican. Lizzy Lizard will prove popular with confident readers; and with families who can spend time reading it together.

Kamau Brathwaite was born in Barbados in 1930. He graduated from England’s Cambridge University with a B.A. in history in his early 20s, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in 1968. He lived and worked in Ghana from 1955 to 1962. From the “rooflessness” of his sojourn in Europe, Brathwaite found a rootedness in Africa that would sharpen his sense of “wholeness” and shape his awareness, making him what the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor once called “a poet of the total African consciousness.” The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) and the second trilogy, Mother Poem, Sun Poem (1982) andX/Self (1987) are among Brathwaite’s published works that surged his international standing, but since Middle Passages (1992), the literary world has seemingly been expecting another major volume of poetry from him. Words Need Love Too (2000) represents that long-awaited collection. Brathwaite, the distinguished Caribbean poet, historian and literary critic, lives in Barbados at Cow Pastor, part of an estate that includes the sacred burial ground of his ancestors that were enslaved. He has taught at the University of the West Indies and is currently lecturing at New York University. Awards and honors for his poetry and non-fiction include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Bussa Award, Casa de las Americas Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Author’s Book Details

Words Need Love Too
by Kamau Brathwaite

Paperback, poetry, 70 + xx pp., 5.25″ x 8″

ISBN: 0-913441-47-3

Words Need Love Too represents, perhaps, Kamau Brathwaite’s most concentrated effort at fashioning a new literary tradition out of the fragmented pieces/rhythms/nation languages that form the New World. No other poet, living or dead, makes us participants in, and co-celebrants of the liturgy of the word, like Brathwaite. This is the long-awaited collection from Kamau Brathwaite.

$15  Book Reviews

Stéphane G. Brooks was born in St. Martin and studied in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies and the United Theological College of the West Indies. He is a minister of the Gospel in the Methodist Church in the Caribbean and the Americas. Minister Brooks has visited and worked throughout the Caribbean, where he ministered with hundreds of people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS . He believes that the Church, its community gatherings, in the role as “a community,” are called to significantly facilitate healing. The husband and father of three, pastors the Guadeloupe mission of the Methodist church. Minister Brooks is the Guadeloupe coordinator of the NGO Chrétiens et Sida (Christians and AIDS). He hold a graduate degree in business management from ESSEC School of Management. HIV/AIDS ­ A Christian Perspective of Healing for the Caribbean is his first book.

Author’s Book Details

HIV/AIDS
A Christian Perspective of Healing for the Caribbean
by Stéphane G. Brooks

Paperback, health/lifestyle, 62 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-88-0

Minister Brooks illustrates with faith, scriptures, and facts why faith-based organizations should focus on non-discrimination, prevention and care relative to HIV/AIDS … as “healing congregations” to the individual, the community and the nation.
– Suzette Moses-Burton, Program manger, HIV/AIDS Program Government of the Island territory of St. Maarten

$10  Book Reviews

Ruby Bute is the first St. Martin woman to publish a volume of poetry. Her poems, collected in this her first book, a seminal work, is fundamental to forming a body of “S’maatin” literature, which is now as a fledgling phoenix thrashing in the glowing coal keel of our Oral Tradition. Bute’s success and that of a genuine St. Martin people’s literature, will be in the pursuit and engagement of originality and excellence, and in so doing anneals its place as a dynamic component of Our Caribbean’s great oral/literary traditions. Golden Voices of S’maatin is also about direction, the linking of Self into Nation, and it achieves sincerely in being a (maybe pre-iconoclastic) gentle guide, and generative of a “Sweet S’maatin” pride, an intense loving warmth, and a family strength which is, however harassed of late, steeped in the folk values and living culture of this Caribbean nation.

Author’s Book Details

Golden Voices of S’maatin
by Ruby Bute

Paperback, poetry, 63 pp. (Second printing)

ISBN: 0-913441-25-3

Golden Voices of S’maatin is about direction, the linking of Self into Nation, and it achieves sincerely in being a (maybe pre-iconoclastic) gentle guide, and generative of a sweet S’maatin pride, an intense loving warmth, and a family strength which is, however harassed of late, steeped in the folk values and living culture of this Caribbean nation.
– Lasana M. Sekou, Managing Editor, Newsday

$10  Book Reviews

Ras Changa was born in Aruba in 1957. He has lived in Trinidad and The Netherlands before making St.Martin his home–where his first book, Illegal Truth (1991), was published. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s he became well known for his belief in RasTafari, for the recital of his thundering poetry at various cultural manifestations, as a budding actor, and as an organizer for the bus drivers association in the South of the island.

Author’s Book Details

Illegal Truth
by Ras Changa

Paperback, poetry, 93 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-11-2

A first volume of thunderous poetry that links Moses, Mosiah, Martin and Mandela.

$15  Book Reviews

Wendy-Ann Diaz is a social studies teacher at Addelita Cancryn Junior High School in St. Thomas, USVI. Born in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, she attended Charlotte Amalie High School in St. Thomas. Diaz holds a BA in history and another in psychology from Florida State University. Well known as an academic and civic activist, particularly for the improvement of student life and scholastic achievement, Diaz has initiated or organized the CORE Reading Program, Hands Across the Campus, Students School Improvement Committee (SSIC), and the Tshwane 3D Intervention Program at Addelita Cancryn. With a number of nominations for Teacher of the Year and the Heath Award (VI Humanities Council), she is a Women Pioneering the Future for Children awardee. A writer of songs, poetry, plays, and stories, Wendy-Ann Diaz has aptly written her first book, Claude’s Adventure.

Author’s Book Details

Claude’s Adventure
by Wendy-Ann Diaz

Paperback, fiction; youth literature, 32 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-83-1

Claude’s Adventure reads like a classic storybook … for the reading and listening public in the Caribbean and wherever children are growing up in a de-centered child’s world.
– Dr. Gene Emanuel, University of the Virgin Islands

A spellbinding adventure of one boy’s possibility for transformation as he grasps the value of the struggles that precede him. A necessary and easily absorbed read for this generation …
– Cobzi Cabrera-Sanchez, Founder, COZBI inc.

$15  Book Reviews

Tishani Doshi was born in Madras, India, in 1975. She received her master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins University and worked in London in advertising before returning to India in 2001. At the age of twenty-six, an encounter with the legendary choreographer Chandralekha led her to an unexpected career in dance. In 2006, her book of poems Countries of the Body won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in the UK. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for poetry and winner of the All-India Poetry Competition. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was published to critical acclaim in 2010 and has been translated into several languages. It was long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and short-listed for the Hindu Literary Prize. Her articles have appeared in newspapers such as the Guardian, International Herald Tribune, The Hindu, The Weekend Financial Times, Vogue, Elle, and The New York Times. Doshi now divides her time between a village by the sea in South India, and elsewhere.

Author’s Book Details

The Adulterous Citizen: poems stories essays
by Tishani Doshi

Paperback, poems, literature, 136 pp.

$20

ISBN: 978-0996224-22-2

Tishani Doshi brings to the written page the precision, poise and sensuality of an accomplished dancer, which is also what she is. – Tabish Khair, poet and novelist

Louis L. Duzanson was born on November 16, 1948, San Nicolas, Aruba. His early schooling was completed at St. Joseph School in St.Martin. From 1966 to 1971, he studied public administration at Bestuurschool Overijsel and document management at Studie-kring Overheidsdocumentatie in The Nether-lands. Duzanson heads the government’s Facilitation (general affairs) department in the southern part of St. Martin, a Dutch colony. Between 1975 and 1991, the career civil servant headed the legal affairs and archives depart-ments, “Functioned” as island secretary and acting island secretary; and in 1994 chaired the working group that investigated the commisssion to evaluate Dutch “higher supervision” on the territory’s goverment. Duzanson has been an advisor to government on electoral matters since 1979. This leading election expert is often consulted by politicians, scholars, and the media on bureaucracy and government history. Duzanson’s articles on the election process have appeared in the St.Martin Newsday, The St.Maarten Guardian, The Chron-icle, and The Civil Server. The Lions Club member’s hobbies include baseball, and “reading up on legal issues and history.”

Author’s Book Details

An Introduction to Government – Island territory of St. Maarten
by Louis Duzanson

Paperback, political science, 90 pp., 5.25” x 8” (Second printing)

ISBN: 0-913441-51-1

The first a-b-c reader written in English in St. Martin about the workings of the legislature, executive, and supervisory branches of the government of the “island territory of
St. Maarten.”

$15  Book Reviews

Howard A. Fergus, Ph.D., was born in Montserrat. He studied at the universities of the West Indies (UWI), Bristol, and Manchester. The literary critic and former UWI professor of Eastern Caribbean studies has published widely in the areas of history, education, and poetry. His books include Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony, History of Education in the British Leeward Islands 1838­-1945, Lara Rains and Colonial Rites,Calabash of Gold, and Volcano Verses. Dr. Fergus was the Speaker of the Montserrat Legislative Council (1974-2001) and has acted as Deputy Governor periodically since 1976. Awards include the University Vice Chancellor’s Award of Excellence and a knighthood (KBE) by Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth of England. Love, Labor, Liberation in Lasana Sekou is his most recent title.

Author’s Book Details

I Believe
by Howard A. Fergus

Paperback, comparative literature, culture studies, criticism, 104 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-95–4

In the clean lyric line, the rhyming line … an honest, unsentimental perception of humanity. From a freshly-wrought volcanic landscape, Fergus speaks authentically, deeply.
– Marion Bethel, author, The Bahamas

More than an untroubled declaration of faith, I Believe is in fact an option to believe, and so evokes its absent opposite against which it presses given humanity’s ‘imperfect garden.’
– Dr. Jennifer Rahim, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago

$15  Book Reviews

 

Love, labor, liberation, In Lasana Sekou
by Howard A. Fergus

Paperback, comparative literature, culture studies, criticism, 192 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-913441-87-9

The writings of Lasana M. Sekou have been compared to the works of a range of poets, from Aimé Césaire to Oswald Mtshali, from Kamau Brathwaite to Dylan Thomas, from e.e. cummings to Linton Kwesi Johnson, but Fergus insists that “the voice that reaches us is sui generis, unique and Sekouesque.” Fergus throws wide ajar the doors to enter into Sekou’s poetics with authority and anticipation.

$15Book Reviews

 

Esther Gumbs, is one of St. Martin’s most promising poets. There are those who insist that the Sundial High school graduate has the poise of a poetic wunderkind. Certainly,Tales From The Great Salt Pond (1996), her first volume of poems, offers wonderful promise. In 1995, Esther represented St.Martin at CARIFESTA, reciting alongside lterary giants and novice contemporaries in Trinidad’s famed Woodford Square. In 1993, she was honored for her poetry recital in Curacao by the St.Maarten Cultural Foundation at the annual St.Martin’s Day concert. Her poems have appeared in Discover St.Martin/St.Maaarten, St.Maarten Guardian, Teen Magazine and other national publications. In 1989, Esther’s “Who Were My People?” won second prize in House of Nehesi Publishers Foundation’s “Great Emancipation Day Poetry Contest!”

Author’s Book Details

Tales From The Great Salt Pond
by Esther Gumbs

Paperback, poetry, 54 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-27-9

Tales From The Great Salt Pond is insightful and thought-stimulating. The poetess keeps us interacting with the culture through these changing times, drawing from the dynamism of our existence as one people.
– Judith Arnell, Psy. D., St. Martin

$15  Book Reviews

Jay Haviser, Jr., Ph.D. is an archaeologist who has conducted and participated in extensive archaeological work in St.Martin. A well-published expert on ancient Amerindian archaeology, the USA-born Dr. Haviser has served as vice president of the International Association of Caribbean Archaeology (1993-1997), editorial review board member of the Latin American Antiquity Journal, a member of the Curacao Historical Society, Society of Africanist Archaeology, and Society of Professional Archaeologists. Dr. Haviser is a graduate of Florida State University, USA, and the Royal University of Leiden, The Netherlands.

Author’s Book Details

In Search of St. Martin’s Ancient Peoples – Prehistoric Archaeology
by Dr. Jay B. Haviser

(English edition with French translation)

This archaeological overview of ancient St. Martin represents part of the missing link in the huge jig-saw puzzle that is still being assembled to accuratelypresent Amerindian history in the Caribbean.
– Desrey Fox, Amerindian Research Unit, University of Guyana

$10  Book Reviews

Lydia G. Henderson, a well-known St. Martin radio personality, joined the ranks of the island’s authors with her first book, Lydia – From Heterosexual to Bisexual to Lesbian to God. The autobiography tracks open and intimate aspects of Henderson’s life from childhood in the 1970s, to the year of the book’s publication. Lydia’s parents reared her in Guyana and Suriname, along with her 10 brothers and sisters.

Charles Borromeo Hodge was born on November 9, 1939, to St. Martin parents in San Nicholas, Aruba. He was raised by his grandmother, Ann Catherine Hodge, in St. Martin, where he attended St. Joseph School. He completed elementary and high school (HBS) in Curacao, where he won the Neerlandia Prijs for composition writing. In 1959, Hodge, with high school diploma in hand, headed home, again. That same year, the grass roots political activist Leonides “Bahba” Richardson, introduced Hodge to the nation’s father of journalism and political progressive Joseph H. Lake, Sr. Lake’s influence on Hodge’s writing and political development would be profound and not without controversy. Hodge’s first poem, “The Rock,” appeared in a 1959 issue of Lake’s Winward Islands Opinion. He also wrote articles “of a radical nature,” at a time when many St. Martiners hid in the alleys of Great Bay (Philipsburg) to buy the Opinion newspaper, because of its writings against “slave wages” and the political system that were “keeping down people. ” In 1970, Hodge emigrated to Harlem, USA. In that “Black Mecca” of New York City, the St. Martiner wrote most of the poems of his first volume, Songs & Images for St.Martin (1997). In 1991, Hodge returned to St. Martin, “to stay.” After his return home, his poems, short stories, essays, and commentaries appeared with ravenous persistency in especially the daily St. Maarten Guardian. The senior poet’s writings also appeared regularly in the nation’s other publications until his death in 1998.

Author’s Book Details

Songs & Images of St. Martin
by Charles Borromeo Hodge

Paperback, poetry, 152 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-24-4

Borromeo is a strong, reverberating poetic voice nobody dares ignore. What took him so long to come out with this volume?
– Fabian Badejo, St. Maarten Guardian

$15  Book Reviews

 

Yvette Cynthia Hyman-Connor (1938-1999)¹ has been called “the first lady of St. Martin cuisine” for “having distinguished herself by a combination of service with a personal touch and a tasty [St. Martin] cuisine” as “owner of the world-famous Yvette’s Restaurant … in French Quarter.”² Yvette’s memories of helping out in her mother’s kitchen dates back to 1943, when St. Martin was an island of pastoral villages of barely 10,000 people. When the 10-year-old migrated to Aruba in 1949, her love for cooking was in full bloom and as a teenager she would cook up a storm for the house parties of family and friends. In 1961, she returned to St. Martin with her family. By the early 1970s, the pastoral “Friendly Island” was fast becoming the newest tourism boom town in the Caribbean. Yvette would become active in public life as a trade unionist and a politician but her love for cooking remained the unwavering constant and she dreamed of opening her own restaurant. “I just love it. I just love to cook, that’s all,” said Yvette in a 1992 interview while preparing the manuscript of her recipes. “What should I say? … It is something from my youth; at the age of five I learned to make johnny cake, dumplings. This is my pride, cooking is my pride. I live for that, and I love food; especially to see my husband get something good in his plate.”³ The realization of the restaurant would “serve” her personal dream, an ambition born of the traditional St. Martin sense of industry, pride in the nation’s culture that all of the island’s people can share, and what should be a natural hospitality feature of providing original St. Martin experiences for visitors. “I wanted to do my own business and better yet, it was something my husband could help me with,” said Yvette. On January 15, 1983, Yvette and her husband Andre Felix Hyman — himself a veteran chef — rented a humble country house and opened Yvette’s Restaurant in her native village of French Quarter. At the onset of the 21st century, Chez Yvette’s Restaurant has become a St. Martin institution. The traditional and contemporary dishes made from Yvette’s recipes have won the restaurant a Diplôme D’Honneur from the Restaurateurs de Métier des Provinces Françaises. The legion of islanders and visitors to St. Martin that have flocked to lunch and dinner at Yvette’s Restaurant is already a great testament to the irresistible and very palatable legacy of chef Yvette Hyman. Loyal diners, some from the time when Yvette was chef to date, have included St. Martin and Caribbean dignitaries and international celebrities such as Harry Belafonte, Romare Bearden, Vanessa Williams, Richard Pryor and George Foreman. The popularity of Yvette and her cooking certainly lives on in this her first and only cook book, From Yvette’s Kitchen to Your Table – A Treasury of St. Martin’s Traditional & Contemporary Cuisine.

¹  See complete profile in the cook book From Yvette’s Kitchen to Your Table – A Treasury of St. Martin’s Traditional & Contemporary Cuisine (House of Nehesi Publishers, 2010).
²  “Final Adieu to Yvette Today – World Figures Send Messages of Condolences,” The St. Maarten Guardian 25 Aug. 1999: 1.
³  Yvette Hyman, Personal interview (1992).

Author’s Book Details

From Yvette’s kitchen to Your Table
A Treasury of St. Martin’s Traditional & Contemporary Cuisine
by Yvette Hyman

ISBN:0-913441-16-3 (hard cover)

Delicious, delectable, and delightful dishes.
– Gloria Ferris-Bell, nutritionist

The recipes of award-winning chef Yvette Hyman, “first lady of St. Martin’s national cuisine” and founder of Yvette’s Restaurant, a gastronomic institution on the Caribbean’s “best dining island” — hailed in the Newsday,The Boston Sunday Globe, The Washington Post among other media.

$30Book Reviews

Drisana Deborah Jack was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1970, to Caribbean parents. As a child her parents brought her to St. Martin, her mother’s home island, where she was reared in Cole Bay village. Jack graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with an MFA in 2002 but by then had already co-founded and acted with the Teenage Acting Company while attending the MPC high school, and published her first poetry book, The Rainy Season (1997), in St. Martin. She went on to exhibit her artwork in the Caribbean, the USA, Europe, and Japan. Jack, a Caribbean artist by “geography and cultural/spiritual location, constructs … a personal/cultural history based on ancestral or re-memory using painting, video, photography, sound art, and poetry.” Her poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Calabash. Articles citing and reviewing her work have appeared in Today, The St. Maarten Guardian, Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten,Artpapers Journal, Buffalo News, and in Fabian Badejo’s Salted Tongues ­ Modern Literature in St. Martin(2003). Jack has recited her poetry and lectured on the cultural arts at readings and festivals such as No To The Franco-Dutch Treaty, CARIFESTA VI, VII, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Miami Bookfair International, Crossing the Seas, Poetry Africa, and Tradewinds. A leading St. Martin poet and mother of one daughter, Jack is an assistant art professor at New Jersey City University. Awards and honors include a Caribbean Writers Institute Fellow (UM), Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and New York Foundation for the Arts grants, SUNY Buffalo Dissertation Fellowship, Photography Institute fellow, Lightwork Artist-in-Residence (Syracuse University), CEPA Exhibition Award, and a US National Endowment for the Arts residency at Big Orbit Gallery. Skin is Jack’s second book of poems.

Author’s Book Details

skin
by Drisana Deborah Jack

Paperback, poetry, literature, 71 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-78-3

Compelling … We are all migrants now, children and foundlings of diaspora.
– Darryl Accone, University of Witwatersrand

Skin takes us through blanket of night, seaweeds, the embrace of the sea, interrupted sky, and rain storms.
– Jacqueline Goffe-McNish, SUNY

$15  Book Reviews

Daniella Jeffry-Pilot was born in Marigot, St. Martin in 1941. Her early education was received in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. In 1965, Jeffry graduated with honor from the prestigious University of Paris-La Sorbonne with a Bachelor of Arts in English and in 1971 she obtained a Master’s Certificate of Higher Studies at the University of Tananarive in Madagascar. On her return to St. Martin in 1974, she taught high school French and English languages at the Collège of Marigot until her retirement in 2000. In 1991, Jeffry was appointed by the Collège to develop its two-year English-French teaching program.

The educator has been writing and lecturing in public fora about St. Martin’s history, culture and politics for over 20 years. As vice president of the first board of the Sandy Ground Cultural Center in 1975, Jeffry succeeded it first president Albéric Richards when he was elected first deputy mayor and general councilor in 1977. She would resign from the center’s presidency soon after to become “more involved in community activism, because of the many social and racial problems resulting from the influx of the first wave of Europeans that began changing the face of the island.” Jeffry’s activism led to an unsuccessful contest of the 1981 cantonal or general council election and the first regional election on a Guadeloupe candidates list in 1983. However, in 1998, she co-founded the United Saint-Martin Movement and three years later was elected to the Municipal Council in Marigot. In 1990, Jeffry was appointed president of the Saint-Martin People’s Consensus by Mayor Albert Fleming to study the possibility of an administrative status change for St. Martin (North). Within two years the seven-member association, which included Louis Constant Fleming, published its report, Saint-Martin: Its Specificities, Its Realities, Its Future in French, followed the year after by an English translation. Jeffry was the coordinating editor of A Status for Saint-Martin ­ References of Hope/Saint-Martin: Objectif statut ­ Repères pour l’espoir(2002), the book of the major studies of Consensus and other sources on constitutional matters relative to St. Martin (North) from 1989 to 1999.

In 1978, nearly ten years before 1963 – A Landmark Year in Saint-Martin appeared as a fourteen-part series inSt. Maarten/St. Martin Newsday, Jeffry co-founded Cogito, a bilingual review for which she wrote articles on education, history, linguistics and society and translated a number of the articles from French to English. A court-certified translator since 1989, Jeffry has translated the published works of archaeologist Dr. Jay Haviser and noted author George Lamming into French. A member of the Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, the mother of three sons and one daughter was awarded France’s Knight of the Legion of Honor in Education in 2001. The retrospective look 1963 – A Landmark Year in Saint-Martin is Daniella Jeffry’s first book.

l’auteur

Daniella Jeffry Pilot est née à Marigot, St. Martin en 1941. Elle a effectué ses études primaires et secondaires respectivement au Pensionnat St. Joseph de Cluny et au Lycée Gerville-Réache à Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. En 1965, Jeffry a obtenu une Licence d’Enseignement d’Anglais avec mention honorable à la prestigieuse Université de Paris-Sorbonne et en 1971 un Certificat de Maîtrise en Anglais à l’Université de Tananarive, Madagascar. A son retour à St. Martin en 1974, elle enseigna le français au Collège d’enseignement Technique puis en 1976 l’anglais au Collège de Marigot jusqu’en 2000. In 1991, Jeffry fut chargée par son principal de mettre en œuvre un programme bilingue de deux ans au Collège de Marigot avant de prendre sa retraite en l’an 2000.

L’Educatrice a écrit et donné des conférences sur l’histoire, la culture et la politique de St. Martin pendant plus de 20 ans. En qualité de vice-présidente du premier conseil d’administration du Centre Culturel de Sandy Ground en 1975, Jeffry succéda à son premier président Albéric Richards lorsqu’il fut élu premier adjoint au maire et conseiller général en 1977. Elle démissionna de la présidence du Centre pour “s’engager plus activement dans sa communauté en raison des nombreux problèmes sociaux et raciaux résultant de l’afflux de la première vague d’Européens qui commençait à changer la vie sur l’île.” Jeffry contesta sans succès les élections cantonales de 1981 et la première élection régionale de 1983 sur une liste en Guadeloupe qui obtint un siège. Cependant en 1998, elle fut l’un des fondateurs du Mouvement Saint-Martin Uni et trois ans plus tard fut élue au Conseil Municipal de Marigot parmi les sept sièges de l’Opposition. En 1990, Jeffry fut nommée présidente du Consensus Populaire Saint-Martinois par le Maire Albert Fléming pour étudier les possibilités d’un changement statutaire pour le Nord de St. Martin. Au bout de deux ans, l’association de sept membres, comprenant entre autres Louis Constant Fléming, publia son rapport en français, Saint-Martin: Ses Spécificities, Ses Réalités, Son Avenir, suivi l’année suivante de l’édition anglaise. Jeffry fut l’éditeur coordinateur de Saint-Martin: Objectif Statut – Repères pour l’Espoir (2002), un recueil d’études réalisées par Consensus et d’autres auteurs sur l’évolution statutaire de St. Martin (Nord) de 1989 à 1999, en édition bilingue.

En 1978, presque dix ans avant qu’apparut 1963 – A Landmark Year in Saint-Martin, une série en quatorze parties, dans le St. Maarten/St. Martin Newsday, Jeffry fut l’un des fondateurs de Cogito, la première revue bilingue de l’île, à laquelle elle contribua avec des articles sur l’histoire, l’education, la linguistique et la société et traduisit tous les articles de la revue. Traducteur-Expert près la Cour d’Appel de Basse-Terre depuis 1989, Jeffry a traduit en français les ouvrages de l’archéologue Dr. Jay Haviser et de l’auteur de grande renommée George Lamming. Membre de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, cette mère de trois fils et une fille fut nommée Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques par décret ministériel du 21 février 2001.

Author’s Book Details

1963 – A Landmark Year in St. Martin
A Retrospective Look by Daniella Jeffry-Pilot

1963 – ANNÉE CHARNIÈRE À SAINT-MARTIN
Un Regard Rétrospectif par Daniella Jeffry-Pilot

(English & French edition. Traduction Française dans cette édition)

Paperback, history; photos/images, bibliographical notes, 206 pp., 5″ x 7.5″

ISBN: 0-913441-59-7

The description of every day life of citizens from the North and South in 1963, and the decisions made at the time, . . . connects us to the highly diversified community of contemporary St. Martin.
– Drs. Gracita R. Arrindell, Director, Bureau of Constitutional Affairs,St. Martin (South)

“Les ingrédients du succès sont réunis: une documentation de proximité, le parfum nostalgique d’un ‘monde que nous avons perdu’ qui fait le charme de ce récit, mais également des témoignages sur les comportements et les attitudes, durant ‘l’année charnière’ 1963, en bref l’analyse d’une culture qui fait de cette étude à la fois un ouvrage d’histoire et d’anthropologie culturelle”.
– Alain Buffon, Professeur associé à L’Université des Antilles et de la GuyaneGuadeloupe

$15  Book Reviews

Ellsworth McGranahan “Shake” Keane was born on May 30, 1927, in St. Vincent, Caribbean. Born into a humble family that loved books and music, he completed his early education on the island and worked at the St. Vincent Grammar School as a “pupil-teacher” or teaching assistant of Music, French, and English literature. Taught to play the trumpet by his father, Charles (who died when Keane was thirteen), Keane’s first public recital was at age six. At age fourteen, he led a musical band made up of his brothers. In the 1940s, with his mother Dorcas working to raise six children, the teenager joined one of the island’s leading bands, Ted Lawrence and His Silvertone Orchestra. The distinctive horn-playing of Keane became a feature of the annual Vincentian carnival, long before he would be called one of the best flugel horn players in Europe and became known in international jazz circles during the 1950s and 1960s. His complimentary passion to music was poetry, which he had been writing since childhood. (It is still not certain whether the boyhood nickname of “Shake” was short for Shakespeare because Shake so loved literature or for the song Chocolate Milk Shake that he loved as a youth.) Before leaving for England in 1952, to study English literature at London University, Keane’s first two books, L’Oubli(1950, self-published) and Ixion (1952) were published. While he did not complete his formal studies in Europe, he recited poetry and prose for and eventually became a producer at Caribbean Voices, the influential BBC General Overseas Service program. Keane’s commitment to writing was as unabated as the application of his “sharp innovative intelligence” to playing music–mambo, kaiso, highlife, and “free form” jazz. Some of his early poetry, probably because of his music, shows some of the first signs of the jazz inflections that would come to significantly influence Caribbean freestyle and dub poetry decades later. In 1972, the musician who had played with the likes of Lord Kitchener, the Joe Harriot Quintet, and Kurt Edelhagen, was back in the region, reciting his poetry at the first Caribbean Festival of the Arts (CARIFESTA) in Guyana. In 1973, Keane accepted an invitation from the government of St. Vincent to serve as director of culture in Kingstown, capital of the island. In 1975, the department was closed after a change in the colony’s government administration. A year later he was appointed principal of Bishop’s College in Georgetown, St. Vincent, and taught at the Intermediate High School in the capital. In 1979, St. Vincent, along with eight closely grouped sister islands, emerged from centuries of British colonial rule to become the independent country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. In that historic year, Keane self-published The Volcano Suite – A series of five poems, and he won what is still the most prestigious pan-Caribbean literary prize, Cuba’s Premio Casa De Las Americas 1979 Poetry. The winning collection, One A Week With Water, was published concurrently in Havana by Casa and remains an essential work of Keane. In 1981, after attending CARIFESTA IV in Barbados, Shake Keane emigrated from his native land to the USA and lived in Brooklyn, New York, with his third wife, Margaret Bynoe. In Brooklyn, he was unable to find immediate work because of his immigrant status and later admitted to feelings of alienation from his “rugged” Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. But the father of three sons, the “musical chameleon,” and the poetic iconoclast of “all kinds of ‘sacred cows,’” intensified his poetry writing though attended less to his music. His poems have appeared in the literary journals Bim, Kyk-over-al, Savacou, and Caribbean Quarterly and have been anthologized in Caribbean Voices, Caribbean Verse, and You Better Believe It. The only CD of his music, Real Keen: Reggae into Jazz, was released in 1991 in London. His contemporaries, literary giants, revolutionary poets, scholars, and admirers such as George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gordon Rohlehr, Edward Baugh, Adrian Fraser, Philip Nanton, Val Wilmer, and Cecil Blazer Williams are among those who hail Shake Keane as one of the innovative fathers of modern Caribbean literature. The Angel Horn – Shake Keane (1927-1997) Collected Poems, an anthology of six unpublished manuscripts, is the fifth and most comprehensive book of Shake Keane’s poetic range and vision from the late 1940s to his last poem written in 1997. At age seventy, ailing with stomach cancer, the gray-bearded giant who towered at six-foot-four, died in Oslo, Norway, in 1997 — at the start of a jazz tour. In 2003, Shake Keane, poet, musician, educator, raconteur, “the grand egalitarian,” was honored by his country with the unveiling of a life-size bust at the Peace Memorial Hall in Kingstown.

Author’s Book Details

The Angel Horn Shake Keane (1927-1997) Collected Poems
by Shake Keane

Paperback, poetry, literature, 182 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-66-X

The Angel Horn… is vintage Shake Keane. … spanning a period of 40 years the best of Keane, his mastery of the folk culture, play on words, use of nation language and of musical symbols and themes, and the integration of rhymes and riddles … .
– Dr. Adrian Fraser, author, scholar, St. Vincent & The Grenadines

$18  Book Reviews

Nidaa Khoury was born in the Upper Galilee village of Fassouta in 1959. Khoury has published seven books of poetry, most of them in Arabic. The Barefoot River (1990) was published in Arabic and Hebrew, and The Bitter Crown (1997), censored in Jordan in 1997, was republished as Rings of Salt in 1998. The works of the Palestinian poet have been studied at the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University and has been widely reviewed by the Arab press. She regularly participates in international conferences such as the Conference of Arab Poets (Amsterdam), the Conference of Human Rights and Solidarity with the Third World (Paris), Poetry Africa (Durban), the Poetry Festival of Jordan, the International Poetry Festival of Medellin, the St. Martin Book Fair, and the Napoli Conference on Human Rights. The mother of four works for the Association of Forty, a human rights organization for the full acceptance of the “Unrecognized Arab Villages” in Israel. She is a founding member of the Path to Peace organization and is a member of the General Union of Arab Authors in Israel and of the General Union of Authors of Israel. In 2010, Nidaa Through Silence, a short documentary by Omri Lior about the poet, won first prize at the 8th annual Global Art Film Festival. Other books of poetry by Nidaa Khoury are The Prettiest of Gods Cry (2000), The Culture of Wine (1993), The Belt of Wind (1990), Braid of Thunder (1989), andDeclaring My Silence (1987). She is currently teaching at Ben-Gurion University. The Book of Sins is the first trilingual book of poetry by Nidaa Khoury. It is also the first title with the translation of a full English collection by this important Middle Eastern poet published in the Caribbean and the Americas.

Author’s Book Details

Book of Sins
by Nidaa Khoury

224+pp

ISBN: 978-0-913441-99-2

A first poetry collection published outside the Middle East in English, Arabic and Hebrew 

One of the major exponents of modernist Arab women writing is the Palestinian poet Nidaa Khoury. Khoury was born in the Galilee village of Fassuta. She is the author of seven poetry collections published in Arabic in Israel, Lebanon and Egypt. … Indeed, the exquisite purity of Khoury’s style and her transparent sincerity are further reasons why her poetry altogether escapes the taint of artificial versifying.  … Khoury’s poems transcend national and cultural boundaries … effective even outside her language area.
– Yair Huri, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

$25  Book Reviews

Joseph H. Lake, Jr. is a leading advocate of independence for the Caribbean island of St. Martin, a colony of The Netherlands and France. From 1973 to 1976 he edited the Windward Islands Opinion newspaper. In 1990, his essay “Slavery and Independence” appeared in The Independence Papers – Readings on a New Political Status for St. Maarten/St. Martin, Vol. 1. He is the publisher and editor of St. Martin Newsday (founded as the Windward Islands Newsday in 1976). In 1994, Lake became the founding president of the Independence for St. Martin Foundation, the first organization dedicated to the island’s political independence. In 1997, Lake received the award for achievement in journalism from the student government of the University of St. Martin and Teen Times. He appears regularly on radio and television discussing media, political, and constitutional issues.

Lake is the author of The Republic of St. Martin (2000) and Friendly Anger – The Rise of the Labor Movement in St. Martin (2004).

Author’s Book Details

Friendly Anger – The Rise of the Labor Movement in St. Martin
by Joseph H. Lake, Jr.

Hardcover, labor history, politics, sociology, 313 pp., 5.25” x 8”

ISBN: 0-913441-41-4

Friendly Anger is a very important work not only because it chronicles and describes the events and roles played by key actors that are required for an understanding of any historical period, but also because it gives us a social history of St. Martin. Lake has made a difficult task appear quite simple as he uses his obviously good grasp of the detail to paint for us the wider picture.
– David Abdulah, Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union, Trinidad and Tobago

$30  Book Reviews

 

The Republic of St. Martin
by Joseph H. Lake, Jr.

Paperback, political science, 90 pp., 5.25″ x 8″

ISBN: 0-913441-44-9

Newspaper publisher and political scientist Joseph H. Lake, Jr. presents a unique socio-historical view of the origins and key current realities of the St. Martin nation, an overview of the Southern part of St. Martin as a Dutch colony, and encapsulates a multi-category vision of St. Martin as a republic. Lake is the president of the Independence for St. Martin Foundation.

$15  Book Reviews

George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927, in Carrington Village, Barbados. He was educated at Roebuck Boys School and the prestigious Combemere High School. He received early encouragement from Frank Collymore, his teacher and mentor, and editor of the literary journal, BIM. Lamming left Barbados for Trinidad in 1946, and went to England in 1950. He made his home in London for some twenty-five years. During this time he published six novels and a highly influential collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). Lamming now makes his home in Barbados where he remains actively involved in the cultural life of the Caribbean. Awards and honors include a Guggenheim, the Sommerset Maugham Award, a Canadian Council Fellowship, a British Commonwealth Foundation grant, and a honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies and City University of New York.

EL AUTOR

GEORGE LAMMING nació, el 8 de junio de 1927, en la Villa de Carrington, Barbados. Fue educado en la Roebuck Boys School y en el prestigioso liceo Combemere. Fue tempranamente alentado por Frank Collymore, su maestro y mentor, y editor de la revista literaria Bim. Lamming salió de Barbados para Trinidad en 1946, y partió para Inglaterra en 1950. Vivió en Londrés unos vienticinco años. En ese tiempo publicó seis novels y una muy influyente colección de ensayos, The Pleasures of Exile (1960) [Las delicias del exilio]. Lamming ahora vive en Barbados donde sigue participando activamente en la vida cultural del Caribe. Entre reconocimientos y honores que ha recibido se cuentan una beca Guggenheim, el premio Sommerset Maugham, becas del Consejo Nacional Canadiense y de la British Commonwealth Foundation, y títulos de doctor honoris causa de la University of the West Indies y la City University de Nueva York. Lamming es considerado el mejor conocido de los novelistas políticos del Caribe.

Author’s Book Details

Sovereignty of the Imagination – Conversations III
Language and the Politics of Ethnicity
by George Lamming

Paperback, political philosophy, literature ethnic studies, Caribbean history, 96 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-46-6

The tight relationship between politics, knowledge, language, and the spaces of freedom in Lamming’s writings makes him one of the most important political novelists in Caribbean Literature.
– Dr. Anthony Bogues, Center for Caribbean Thought

$15  Book Reviews

 

Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II
Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual
by George Lamming

Paperback, history, education, political science,103 pp., 5.25″ x 8″ (Second printing)
English edition, with French translation.

ISBN: 0-913441-48-1

The Lamming monographs are themselves part of the current discourse which targets the historical, cultural and scientific implications of the pan-hemispheric encounters that will continue to be of global importance well into the twenty-first century.
– Rex Nettleford, Pro Vice Chancellor, University of the West Indies

$15  Book Reviews

 

Regreso, regreso al hogar: Conversaciónes II
La educación occidental y el intelectual Caribeño por George Lamming
Traducción al español de Roberto Márquez

Monografías, 56+viii paginas, 5.25″ x 8″

ISBN: 0-913441-45-7

– DE LA INTRODUCCIÓN

George Lamming, una de las inteligencias más agudas del Caribe y uno de sus artistas más distinguidos … nos invita a considerar la urgencia de nuestras obligaciones. La elegancia de su palabra no debe en manera alguna quitarle nada a la gravedad del reto … . La incesante lucha exige de todos con el don de una sabiduría y agudeza de ingenio un dedicado compromiso de sí para con el desarrollo constants de la humanidad.

Lo que hemos aprendido de la historia habrá aguzado el conocimiento profundo de nosotros mismos en ese proceso de transformación o hibridización — ese gran arte que es el “irse haciéndo” de la humanidad a base del dinamismo y en la síntesis de las contradicciones. Pues esta es la historia de la vida en todas las Américas de las que nuestro Caribe ha sido eje y parte íntegra durante todo el pasado medio milenio. Esto es, de hecho, fuente y materia de gran literature, gran arte, grandes estructuras sociales, de robustos crisoles de la comprensión humana, de grandes logros intelectuales en las ciencias y en las humanidades desde los tiempos más antiguos hasta nuestros días.

Los ensayos de Lamming son ellos mismos parte del actual discurso que tiene por blanco las implicaciones históricas, culturales, y científicas de los encuentros pan-hemisféricos que continuarán siendo de importancia mundial hasta bien entrado en el siglo vientiuno.
– Rex Nettleford, Pro vice Rector, University of The West Indies, Jamaica, el Caribe

Louie Laveist was born in Great Bay (Philipsburg), St. Martin in 1957. He graduated from the Milton Peters College high school in 1979, but at age 15 he was already a founding member of the Cole Bay Theater Company (CBTC)—named after his native village. Throughout the theatrical hey-day of the 1980s, Laveist was directed by CBTC’s guest directors Victor J. Martin, David Edgecombe and Ian Valz, and landed leading roles in The Game, Old Story Time, Son of A Bitch, Nite Box and Moon On A Rainbow Shawl. In 1991, Laveist founded the United Theatre Company, wrote and directed his first playWho’s Fooling Who?; and became the drama coordinator at the government’s Department of Culture in Great Bay. In the early 1990s, he took courses in acting and writing plays at Jamaica’s Little Rock Theatre and attended lectures by noted author/playwright Earl Lovelace. Laveist directed his Forbidden Love (1992) at Trinidad’s Little Carib Theatre for CARIFESTA VI in 1995, the same year that he completed The House That Jack Built. In 1996, he attended the drama workshop of the Caribbean Writers Institute, University of Miami. It is out of that workshop, conducted by the distinguished Fred D’Aguiar, that he wrote Bondage (1997), his fourth play. The early 1990s environmental activism of this cultural worker might have inspired his political activities in 1995—leading to his 1998 election as one of three St. Martin (South) representatives to the parliament of the Territory of the Netherlands Antilles and his 1999 election to the Island Council in Great Bay. He was re-elected to parliament in 2002. Laveist has been largely absent from the theater and from his seven-year-old weekly radio magazine Culture Club since holding political office, but has written a fifth play, Love You To Death! (2002), which looks at domestic violence in the Caribbean and was performed in St. Martin and Cuba that same year. His work commands a serious enough presence in the fledgling literature of St. Martin (North and South) and The House That Jack Built and Other Plays is Laveist’s first book. Awards include “Best Actor” (1986) and “Best Supporting Actor” (1983) from Aruba’s Caribbean/Latin American Drama Festival. Laveist was profiled in the book St. Martin Massive! A Snapshot of Popular Artists (2000) as one of the nation’s 20 most popular artists at the turn of the century.

Author’s Book Details

The House That Jack Built and Other Plays
by Louie Laveist

Paperback, drama, 97 pp., 5″ x 7.5″

ISBN: 0-913441-28-7

On the evidence of the three plays in The House That Jack Built and Other Plays, it would be safe to conclude that Laveist is a social realist who has elected the family unit as the target of his critical hard stare.
– Funso Aiyejina, from the introduction to The House That Jack Built and Other Plays

$15  Book Reviews

Edgar H. Lynch was born on January 21, 1952, In Aruba. He received his early schooling in St. Martin, and studied teaching at Rotterdam’s Municipal Pedagogic Institute in The Netherlands from 1968 to 1974. He returned to St. Martin in 1975, and became head of administration and scholarship at the central government’s Department of Education-Windward Islands. Lynch served as the general secretary of Algemene Bond voor Overheidspersoneel (ABVO)-Windward Islands and in 1979 and was elected the first president of the Windward Islands Civil Servants Union (WICSU). In the 1970s and 1980s, he freelanced for the New Agenewspaper and wrote for Sinew Sports and its television program. He has been a long-time president of the Boxing Association and the Windward Islands Baseball Association. Since 1991, Lynch has served two four-year terms in the Island Council, the legislative branch of the government of the Southern part of St. Martin. In 1995, the Island Council appointed Lynch, a member of the St. Maarten Patriotic Alliance (SPA) faction, to the Executive Council as commissioner of education, health, social and women affairs. In 1999, he was re-elected to the Island Council.

Author’s Book Details

Know Your Political History – Revised Edition
by Edgar H. Lynch, Julian C. Lynch

Hardcover, 213 pp., 8.5″ x 11″

ISBN: 0-913441-32-5

The first complete guide to the parliamentary and Island Council elections from 1945 to 1999,in St. Martin (South) — an island territory in the Dutch colony of the Netherlands Antilles. Authors’ commentary and integral references are also made of elections and government formation processes in the other island territories of Curacao, Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius (and Aruba before it obtained its separate status in 1986). One extensive interview and short profiles of the leading 20th century St. Martin politicians; an overview of pioneer women politicians; over 30 pages of election graphs and photographs enliven this book. Bibliography and appendix.

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

Julian C. Lynch was born on May 9, 1940, in St. Martin He left St. Martin for the Netherlands in 1974 and obtained his SPD, and accounting degree. Lynch returned home in 1989 and opened Lynch Administration Services. He is the vice president of the Windward Islands Teachers Union and a member of the St. Maarten Social Economic Council.

Author’s Book Details

Know Your Political History – Revised Edition
by Edgar H. Lynch, Julian C. Lynch

Hardcover, 213 pp., 8.5″ x 11″

ISBN: 0-913441-32-5

The first complete guide to the parliamentary and Island Council elections from 1945 to 1999,in St. Martin (South) — an island territory in the Dutch colony of the Netherlands Antilles. Authors’ commentary and integral references are also made of elections and government formation processes in the other island territories of Curacao, Bonaire, Saba, St. Eustatius (and Aruba before it obtained its separate status in 1986). One extensive interview and short profiles of the leading 20th century St. Martin politicians; an overview of pioneer women politicians; over 30 pages of election graphs and photographs enliven this book. Bibliography and appendix.

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

Greta E. Marlin was born in Barbados and has lived on the island of St. Martin for the past 25 years. From 1990 to 2000, Marlin worked at the St. Martin office of the Caribbean airline LIAT, as a customer service agent, senior agent, sales coordinator, and duty officer. A Job Well Done – Memories for a lifetime, is a collection of uncommonly personal stories about working for an airline and travel experiences. In this her first book, Marlin is both airline company “insider” and traveler. Some of the stories may be teased with factual elements, some are hilariously fictional, some are anecdotal, and all offer a very entertaining cockpit view of exciting lifetime memories at LIAT in St. Martin and related experiences in St. Kitts, Antigua, Dominica, Trinidad, New York, Paris, Hawaii, and South Africa.

Author’s Book Details

A Job Well Done – Memories for a lifetime
by Greta E. Marlin

Paperback, leisure, travel,125 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-69-4

Witty! Amusing! Actual events! A wonderful read! Kick off your shoes, sit back and prepare to be thoroughly entertained. I can’t wait until they make the movie.
– Miranda Clark, Queens, New York

$15  Book Reviews

Charles Matz, poet, novelist, dramaturge, and performer, has taught literature at Italian and US universities. His specialties are Dante and Comparative Western Literature (chiefly Italian and French). His shout poetry uses techniques of oral and music composition, and is based in part on traditional forms from the European Mediterranean area and Africa. Matz has contributed articles on contemporary artistic concepts to Opera News, Vogue, and Testuale. He has worked with Norman Mailer and Andrea Zanzotto. Awards include a Chevalier de la Légion d Honneur of France. This is the first publishing of Columbus, The Moor as one book of the performance text in English, along with the Spanish, French, and Italian translations all four texts include various languages, such as Taino (Arawak) and Latin.

Author’s Book Details

Columbus, the Moor | Colón, el Moro
Colomb, le Maure | Colombo, il Moro
by Charles Matz

(English, Spanish, French and Italian Edition)

Paperback, literature, 104 pp.

$25

ISBN: 978-0996224-21-5

The literary works of Charles Matz are extremely complex. … What distinguishes his work is his plunging into the bottomless pit of lasting orality, the long and varied history of poetry-song-ritual.
– Andrea Zanzotto, Pieve di Soligo, Italy

Applicare a Matz etichette può essere assai pericoloso, ma credo che il suo tuffo nel pozzo senza fondo dell oralità perpetua lo caratterizzi inconfondibilmente, riportando in evidenza l originaria identità poesia-canto-rito lungo una catena da gran tempo spezzata, distrutta, e forse non ricostruibile.
– Andrea Zanzotto, Pieve di Soligo

Ce livre est la premieré publication de Colomb, le Maure, comme livret en anglais, avec des traductions en français, italien, et spagnol. Tous les quatre textes comprennent aussi divers autres languages comme le taíno (arawak) et le latin.

Esta es la primera publicación de Colón, el Moro como un único libro del texto teatral en inglés junto a texto español, francés e italiano. Todos los cuatro textos incluyen varias lenguas, como taíno (Arawak) y latín.
– House of Nehesi Publishers

 

Laurelle Richards was born on April 28, 1955 in Freetown, St. Martin, the first of nine children to Alvira Bryan and Albert Richards. At age 14, while she was attending elementary school, Laurelle obtained her sewing diploma from Clara Mingo. At age 16, she left the Girls School of Marigot to help her parents raise her brothers and sisters — which included making the family’s clothes. At the time her father was a construction sub-contractor, and her mother worked in housekeeping at La Samanna resort. In 1972, Laurelle began what she called her “first job training,” making pizza and serving as a waitress at the Portofino restaurant/guesthouse at Mt. O’reilly. When her mother passed away in 1974, Laurelle found employment in housekeeping at La Samanna. In 1988, after the death of her husband and now a mother herself, Laurelle obtained her taxi license. In keeping with a deathbed promise to her mother to “always” keep her “brothers and sisters united,” her family gathers “once a week” for dinner at each other’s homes in Freetown, a hamlet of St. Louis. In 1990, Laurelle founded the Cultural Women Association of Rambaud-Saint Louis to promote knowledge of traditional cooking, folk, and carnival costuming; and how herbs, ground provisions, and fruits were used in both villages and generally on the island of St. Martin. Around 2006, Laurelle became a founding member of the Rambaud St-Louis Fête Association, a cultural promotion group for which she was the president. Schools and cultural organizations from both parts of St. Martin regularly invited Laurelle Richards to exhibit and talk about the nation’s folklife. In 2002, with the recital of “The Frock,” Laurelle’s poems began to evolve out of what may be called her “Spoken Word” presentations. In 2009, she was a special guest poet at the Poetry in the Garden series, organized in Marigot by the arts and culture department of the Collectivité Territoriale de Saint-Martin. Laurelle, popularly known as “Yaya,” was still an independent taxi driver and worked at La Samanna at the time of her passing on May 26, 2010. Published posthumously, The Frock & Other Poems is the first book by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards.

Author’s Book Details

The Frock & Other Poems
by Laurelle “Yaya” Richards

ISBN: 978-0-913441-54-1

In The Frock & Other Poems, Laurelle “Yaya” Richards, at times playful, sometimes stern, the poems do not avoid conflicts, but her strong womanist voice transcends these divisions with the gentle wisdom of her verse.
– Geoffrey Philp, author, USA

$15  Book Reviews

Datos bio-bibliográficos

Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, ensayista y crítico literario cubano. Terminó estudios de Lengua y Literaturas Hispánicas en la Universidad de La Habana y obtuvo la categoría de Investigador de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba. Ha impartido conferencias en universidades de los Estados Unidos de América, Cuba, Puerto Rico, México, Jamaica, Haití y Alemania. Ha colaborado en Casa de las Américas, Bim, Caribbean Quarterly,Cuadernos Americanos, Revue Internationale de Litterature Comparé, Del Caribe, Gaceta de Cuba, Temas y Universidad de La Habana. Entre sus distinciones se encuentran el Premio “Razón de Ser” del Centro Alejo Carpentier, la Beca de Investigación CUNY Caribbean, la Beca de Investigación de la Fundación Nicolás Guillén y el Premio Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Ensayo Tercer Milenio. Participó además en el Visiting Scholars’ Program del Africana Studies and Research Center (Cornell University). Es miembro del Tribunal de Categorías Científicas del Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística de Cuba y ha sido jurado del Premio Literario Casa de las Américas, del Premio Nacional de Cultura COLCULTURA y del Concurso Internacional Oralidad ORCALC-UNESCO. Se desempeñó en Casa de las Américas (1972-2000) como investigador del Centro de Investigaciones Literarias y del Centro de Estudios del Caribe, dirigió el Centro de Estudios del Caribe desde 1994 hasta 1998 y fue fundador/editor de Anales del Caribe (1981-2000). Rodríguez es miembro del Comité Editorial de la Revista Mexicana del Caribe, el Comité Académico de la Biblioteca del Caribe (Puerto Rico) y la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC). Es autor de Literatura caribeña. Bojeo y cuaderno de bitácora (1989); Religiones Afroamericanas (coordinador, 1996); Acriollamiento y discurso escrit/oral caribeño (2001) y las antologías de Efraín Huerta, Pedro Juan Soto y Cuentos para ahuyentar el turismo; 16 autores puertorriqueños. Ha colaborado en: Panorama histórico literario de nuestra América (1982), América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura (1995), Diccionario Enciclopédico de las Letras de América Latina (1996), Defining New Idioms and Alternative Forms of Expression (1996), A History of Literature in the Caribbean (1997), Spain’s 1898 Crisis(2000), A Pepper-Pot of Cultures; Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean (2003), La oralidad: ¿ciencia o sabiduría popular? (2004) y Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature (2006).

About the editor

Emilio Jorge Rodríguez is a Cuban essayist and literary critic. Rodríguez graduated with degrees in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Havana University and as Researcher at the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has lectured at universities in the USA, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti, and Germany. His articles and essays have appeared in Casa de las Américas, Bim, Caribbean Quarterly, Cuadernos Americanos,Revue Internationale de Litterature Comparé, Del Caribe, Gaceta de Cuba, Temas and Universidad de La Habana. Awards and honors include the “Razón de Ser” from the Centro Alejo Carpentier, a CUNY Caribbean Fellowship, a Fundación Nicolás Guillén Fellowship, and the Latin American and Caribbean Third Millennium Essay Award. He was selected for the Visiting Scholars’ Program of the Africana Studies and Research Center (Cornell University). Rodríguez has served as a member of the board of examiners for Scientific Degrees at the Cuban Literature and Linguistic Institute and was an awards jury member for Casa de las Américas, the National Culture Award COLCULTURA, and the International Orality Contest ORCALC-UNESCO. Rodríguez was a researcher at Casa de las Américas’ Literary Research Center and Center of Caribbean Studies (1972-2000). He was the director of the Center of Caribbean Studies from 1994 to 1998 and the founder/editor of Anales del Caribe (1981-2000). He is member of the editorial board of Revista Mexicana del Caribe, the Academic Committee of the Biblioteca del Caribe Series (Puerto Rico), and the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (UNEAC). Rodríguez is the author of Literatura caribeña; bojeo y cuaderno de bitácora (1989); Religiones afroamericanas (coordinator, 1996); Acriollamiento y discurso escrit/oral caribeño (2001). He is the editor of the anthologies of Efraín Huerta, Pedro Juan Soto, and Cuentos para ahuyentar el turismo: 16 autores puertorriqueños. Rodríguez contributed to the following books: Panorama histórico-literario de nuestra América (1982), América Latina: Palavra, Literatura e Cultura (1995), Diccionario Enciclopédico de las Letras de América Latina (1996), Defining New Idioms and Alternative Forms of Expression (1996), A History of Literature in the Caribbean (1997), Spain’s 1898 Crisis (2000), A Pepper-Pot of Cultures; Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean (2003), La oralidad: ¿ciencia o sabiduría popular? (2004), and the Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature (2006).

Author’s Book Details

Corazón de pelícano – Antología poética de Lasana M. Sekou
Pelican Heart – An Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou
Edited by Emilio Jorge Rodríguez

Paperback, poetry, literary criticism, 432 pp.
English • Español

ISBN: 978-0-913441-93-0

Estos poemas, con su oído claro, su hocico observador y su ritmo de tambor innombrable, anuncian la posibilidad de un Caribe mejor.
– Nancy Morejón, author, Cuba

Defiance, movement, and renewal are three words that come to mind when reading Pelican Heart. While the poems themselves defy an easy classification, the collection proposes a new way to “travel” and “read” the Caribbean world and beyond.
– Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Marist College, New York

$20  Book Reviews

Robert Romney was born in St. Martin in 1947. He completed studies in English at the University of the Antilles and Guyane (Guadelopue) and the University of Bordeaux. In 1972, Romney returned to Guadeloupe where he became an English teacher, and in 1996, the inspector of English. He has written articles on pedagogy for the Centre Régional de Documentation Pédagogique. In 2007, Romney was appointed as the representative of the Rector of the Academy of Guadeloupe for the collectivities of Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy.

Robert Romney est né à St. Martin en 1947. Il commença ses études à l’Université des Antilles de la Guyane puis à Bordeaux. Il fut pendant de nombreuses années professeur d’anglais et devint Inspecteur Pédagogique Régional d’anglais en 1996. Il a publié auparavant un petit ouvrage de pédagogie au CRDP de la Guadeloupe. En 2007, il devint le Représentant du Recteur auprès des Collectivités territoriales de Saint-Martin et Saint-Barthélemy.

Author’s Book Details

St. Martin Talk
Words, phrases, sayings & general communication terms
by Robert Romney

ISBN: 978-0-913441-82-4

With information ranging from the witty to the wise, St. Martin Talk is a handbook of words, phrases, sayings and other communication terms—including those from the St. Martin of old that are still much a part of the everyday speech of the island’s people. This quick reference will happily serve as a home, school, office and travel reference and companion.

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

Lasana M. Sekou is the author of 13 books of poetry, monologues, and short stories. He is the leading St. Martin writer and is considered as one of the prolific Caribbean poets of his generation. Reviewers have compared Sekou’s poetry to the works of a range of poetic giants, from Aimé Césaire to Oswald Mtshali, from Kamau Brathwaite to Dylan Thomas, from e.e. cummings to Linton Kwesi Johnson. However, writes literary critic Howard Fergus in his book Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, “The voice that reaches us is sui generis, unique and Sekouesque.” Sekou can be heard reciting his poetry to music on the The Salt Reaper Audio CD. His books, such as the The Salt Reaper – poems from the flats, 37 Poems, Nativity and monologues for today, and Brotherhood of the Spurs have been required reading at Caribbean and North American universities. He is the editor of National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer and producer of Fête – The first recording of Traditional St. Martin festive music by Tanny & The Boys. Sekou’s poetry and reviews about his work have appeared in World Literature Today, Postcolonial Text, Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo, Revue Noire, Caribbean Quarterly, Caribbean Review of Books, Boundary 2,Harriet, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Daily Herald, Calabash, Hong Kong Literary Monthly, and Repeating Islands. His poems have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Turkish, and Chinese. A graduate of Stony Brook University (BA/Int’l. Relations) and Howard University (MA/Mass Communication), Sekou has presented papers and recited his poetry at cultural and literary conferences and festivals in the Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. Lasana M. Sekou is an advocate for the independence of St. Martin, which is a colony of France and the Netherlands. Awards and honors include an International Writers Workshop Visiting Fellow, a James Michener Fellow, a knighthood (The Netherlands), Recognition for literary excellence in the service of Caribbean unity (Dominican Republic), Conscious Lyrics Artist of the Decade, and the CTO Award of Excellence. Corazón de pelícano –Antología poética de Lasana M. Sekou / Pelican Heart – An Anthology of Poems by Lasana M. Sekou, a bilingual volume edited by the erudite Cuban scholar Emilio Jorge Rodríguez, was published in 2010. Sekou’s newest title, Nativity / Nativité / Natividad – Trilingual Edition (2010) is the author’s first title published in English with French and Spanish translations in one volume.

Datos bio-bibliográficos

Lasana M. Sekou, escritor de San Martín, es autor de los poemarios Moods for Isis; Picture poems of Love & Struggle (1978), For the Mighty Gods…An Offering (1982), Images in The Yard (1983), Maroon Lives; For Grenadian freedom fighters (1983), Born Here (1986), Nativity and monologues for today (1988),Mothernation; Poems from 1984 to 1987 (1991), Quimbé; Poetics of sound (1991), The Salt Reaper; Poems from the flats (2004, 2005), 37 Poems (2005) y Nativity / Nativité / Natividad (2010). Ha publicado el libro de narraciones Brotherhood of the Spurs (1997, 2007) y realizó la edición del volumen National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer, así como la producción de Fête – The first recording of Traditional St. Martin festive music, por Tanny & The Boys. Además, un recital de su poesía con acompañamiento musical se encuentra en el CD The Salt Reaper (2009). Algunos de sus textos se han utilizado como material de lectura en universidades del Caribe y los Estados Unidos de América. Poemas de Sekou y reseñas sobre su obra han aparecido en Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo, Revue Noire, World Literature Today, Caribbean Quarterly, Postcolonial Text, Caribbean Review of Books, Boundary 2, Harriet, The Jamaica Gleaner, Newsday, The Daily Herald, The Arts Journal, Calabash y Repeating Islands. Textos suyos han sido traducidos al español, holandés, francés, alemán, turco y chino. Ha participado en conferencias y festivales culturales y literarios en el Caribe, América del Norte y del Sur, África, Europa y Asia. Entre los premios y distinciones que ha recibido se encuentran: Profesor Invitado al Taller Internacional de Escritores, Becario James Michener, título de Sir (Países Bajos), Reconocimiento de excelencia literaria al servicio de la unidad caribeña (República Dominicana), Artista Concious Lyrics de la Década y Premio de Excelencia de la Organización de Turismo del Caribe.

L’auteur

Lasana M. Sekou est l’auteur de 13 recueils de poésie, monologues et nouvelles. C’est un écrivain saint-martinois de grande envergure et il est considéré comme l’un des poètes caribéens les plus prolifiques de sa génération. Les critiques ont comparé la poésie de Sekou à l’œuvre d’une variété de géants de la poésie, d’Aimé Césaire à Oswald Mtshali, de Kamau Brathwaite à Dylan Thomas, de e.e. cummings à Linton Kwesi Johnson. Cependant, écrit le critique littéraire Howard Fergus dans son livre Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, [Amour Labeur Libération chez Lasana Sekou], “ La voix qui arrive jusqu’à nous est sui generis, unique et Sekouesque.” On entend Sekou réciter sa poésie au son de la musique dans l’audio CD The Salt Reaper [Le Ramasseur de Sel]. Ses livres, tels que The Salt Reaper – poems from the flats, 37 Poems, Nativity and monologues for today, et Brotherhood of the Spurs sont étudiés dans les universités de la Caraïbe et d’Amérique du Nord. Il est l’éditeur de National Symbols of St. Martin – A Primer et producteur de Fête – The first recording of traditional St. Martin festive music par Tanny & The Boys. La poésie de Sekou et les critiques sur son œuvre ont paru dans Callalo, The Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo,Revue Noire, World Literature Today, Caribbean Quarterly, Postcolonial Text, Caribbean Review of Books,Boundary 2, Harriet, The Jamaica Gleaner, Newsday, The Daily Herald, The Arts Journal et Calabash. Ses poèmes ont été traduits en espagnol, hollandais, français, allemand, turc et chinois. Sekou a fait des conférences et récité sa poésie lors de colloques et festivals littéraires et culturels dans la Caraïbe, en Amérique du Nord et du Sud, en Afrique, Europe et Asie. Des prix et des distinctions lui ont été décernés tels que Membre Visiteur de l’International Writers Workshop, Membre de James Michener, le titre de Chevalier (Pays-Bas), la Reconnaissance de l’excellence littéraire au service de l’unité caribéenne (République Dominicaine), l’Artiste de la Décennie par Conscious Lyrics et le Prix d’Excellence de CTO [Organisation du Tourisme Caribbéen]. Lasana M. Sekou est un défenseur de l’indépendance de St. Martin, qui est une colonie de la France et des Pays-Bas. Cette nouvelle édition de Nativity/Nativité/Natividad est le premier titre de l’auteur publié en anglais avec des traductions française et espagnole en un seul volume.

Informatie over de schrijver

Lasana Sekou heeft 13 boeken geschreven, waaronder gedichten, monologen en novellen. Hij is een vooraanstaande auteur uit St. Martin en wordt beschouwd als een van de meest productieve Caribische dichters van zijn tijd. Recensenten vergelijken de gedichten van Sekou met de werken van een reeks poëtische reuzen, o.a. Aimé Césaire, Oswald Mtshali, Kamau Brathwaite en Dylan Thomas, e.e. Cummings en Linton Kwesi Johnson. Echter, zo schrijft literaire criticus Howard Fergus in zijn boek Love Labor Liberation in Lasana Sekou, “De stem die wij horen is sui generis, ongeëvenaard en Sekouesque”. Men kan Sekou vaak zijn poezie horen voordragen op maat van muziek op de audio CD The Salt Reaper. Zijn boeken, zoals b.v. The Salt Reaper – gedichten van het platteland, 37 gedichten, Nativiteit en hedendaagse monologen en Brotherhood of the Spurs, zijn verplichte lectuur geweest op Caribische en Noord Amerikaanse universiteiten. Hij is de auteur van National Symbols of St. Martin – een handleiding en producent van Fete – De eerste opname van traditionele St. Martin feest muziek door Tanny & The Boys. Poezie van Sekou en kritiek op zijn werk zijn verschenen in Callaloo, The Massachusetts Review, Del Caribe, De Gids, Das Gedicht, Prometeo, Revue Noire,World Literature Today, Caribbean Quarterly, Postcolonial Text, Caribbean Review of Books, Boundary 2, Harriet, Newsday, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Daily Herald, The Arts Journal, and Calabash. Zijn gedichten zijn vertaald in het Spaans, Nederlands, Frans, Duits, Turks en Chinees. De nieuwe uitgave vanNativity/Nativité/Natividad is het eerste volledige boek van de auteur, uitgegeven in het engels met een Franse en Spaanse vertaling in één bundel. Sekou heeft lezingen en voordrachten van zijn gedichten gehouden op culturele en literaire conferenties en feestelijkheden in het Caribische gebied, Noord en zuid Amerika, Afrika, Europa en Azië. Hij heeft veel prijzen en onderscheidingen ontvangen, waaronder een International Writers Workshop, reizende genoot, een James Michener Fellow, een ridderschap (Nederland), Erkenning voor literaire voortreffelijkheid ter onderscheiding van dienst aan de Caribische eenheid ( Dominicaanse Republiek), Keuze van Conscious Lyrics als Artiest van het decennium en Award of Excellence (gunning voor uitmuntendheid) van de CTO. Lasana M. Sekou is een voorstander van Onafhankelijkheid voor St. Martin, dat een kolonie is van Frankrijk en Nederland.

Author’s Book Details

Nativity / Nativité / Natividad
Trilingual Edition
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, poetry, literature, 224 pp.
English • Française • Español

ISBN: 978-0-913441-97-8

Nativity cover art: Adán, sculpture/bronze and Eva, sculpture/bronze by Fernando Botero. © Fernando Botero. Courtesy: Museo de Antioquia, Colombia.

In nine haunting segments … a bold narrative, … long overdue … centralizes the region’s indigenous, African, Asian connections. A triumph of Caribbean aesthetics.
– Dr. Conrad M. James, University of Birmingham, UK

An exuberant, epic rush … a lusty, encyclopedic yawp.
– Roberta Q. Knowles, The Caribbean Writer

$20  Book Reviews

 

Brotherhood of The Spurs
by Lasana M. Sekou

Pocketbook, fiction, short stories; glossary, 171 pp. (2nd printing)

ISBN: 0-913441-86-4

Brotherhood of The Spurs brings a new dimension to the growing stature of Lasana M. Sekou as a St. Martin and Caribbean writer.
– George Lamming, author of Conversations II – Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual

$15  Book Reviews

 

37 Poems
by Lasana M. Sekou

Paperback, poetry, literature, 64 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-74-0

37 Poems is … significant, vigorous and radical, … life-affirming in an age when jaded cynicism often passes for wisdom.
-Dr. Tabish Khair, Aarhus University, Denmark

Somewhere between the grace of haiku and the weight of the epic, Sekou has crafted his most elegant work to date. … These are the poems we should read to our children, lullabies for this new/old world. Each verse reaches across topographical, cultural, and emotional divides and reveals that the heart is home.
– Drisana Deborah Jack, New Jersey City University

$15  Book Reviews

 

The Salt Reaper – poems from the flats
by Lasana M. Sekou

Paperback, poetry, literature, 130 pp. (Second printing)
ISBN: 0-913441-73-2

[Sekou’s] calibanic voice moves between the public, revolutionary political rhetoric of Linton Kwesi Johnson and the lush, esoteric wordplay of Dylan Thomas.
– Ervin Beck, World Literature Today

His sheer writing ability is impressive, Sekou packing in philosophy without preaching … and linking the sensuous and the spiritual. … Sekou is a Caribbean man.
– Mel Cooke, Jamaica Gleaner

$15  Book Reviews

 

Love Songs Make You Cry
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, fiction, short stories; glossary, 95 pp.
ISBN: 0-913441-07-4

With the publication of this collection of short stories, Lasana M. Sekou, whose work in verse has been receiving a deserved regional recognition, has accepted the challenge of prose fiction.
– Drs. Linda Badejo-Richardson

$15Book Reviews

 

Quimbé – The Poetics Sound
by Lasana M. Sekou

Paperback, poetry, 129 pp.
ISBN: 0-913441-14-7

A captivating collection of poems. Sekou’s ninth book.

$10  Book Reviews

 

Nativity and Monologues for Today
by Lasana M. Sekou

Paperback, drama, poetry, 83 pp.
ISBN: 0-913441-04-X

Nativity… is epical, and an impressive achievement in Sekou’s stylistic development.
– Napolina Gumbs, librarian

$15Book Reviews

 

Born Here
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, poetry, 148 pp. Out of print
ISBN: 0-913441-05-8

Born Here should be considered the first true poetic baptism of Lasana Sekou in the still sedated waters of his native island on which more than 300 years of French and Dutch colonial rule has had a numbing lethargic effect.
– Fabian A. Badejo

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

 

Maroon Lives – Tribute to Grenadian Freedom Fighters
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, poetry, 35 pp. Out of print

ISBN: 0-913441-03-1

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

 

For The Mighty Gods… An Offering
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, poetry, 95 pp.

The main feeling flashing through the book is of a conscious young Black man; conscious of the ugliness and beauty of this world. It is clear he understands the tied up beauties of Black life… That our struggles are righteous. That we will win. That our women are Black beauties packed full of the sweetness of love desired and expressed.
– Amiri Baraka

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

 

Moods for Isis – Picture poems of Love & Struggle
by Lasana Sekou

Paperback, poetry, 94 pp.

The variety and quantity of his insight will motivate and stir the soul/mind of his readers to intense passion….as they attempt to absorb his multi-level poetic message.
– Linda Taylor

Forthcoming  Book Reviews

Jackson (Jack) C. Stevens is a management consultant, trainer, and writer who specializes in helping people and organizations achieve higher levels of success through the improvement of communication and interpersonal skills. A graduate of Florida State University, Stevens’ writings and organizational workshops, draw from his work experiences as a factory worker, Army officer, Vietnam War helicopter pilot, university professor, and business executive. A principal of the Institute for Professional Development, Stevens has conducted workshops throughout the United States of America, Europe, China, and St. Martin.

Asha Stevens-Mohabier is an educator and educational consultant who specializes in personality developement and success skills for young people. This Stetson University graduate is the mother of five children, is fluent in Dutch, Hindi, and English, and has worked over the years as a hotel receptionist, multi-lingual radio announcer, teacher, school superintendent, and advisor to government leaders.

Jack and Asha make their home on the beautiful Caribbean island of St. Martin.

Author’s Book Details

More Than A Dream – Prescriptions For Success
by Jackson C. Stevens, Ph.D. with Asha Stevens-Mohabier, M.Ed

Hardcover, 185 pp., 6″ x 9″
ISBN: 0-913441-17-1

Jack and Asha write from their own experience as well as the experience of hundreds of others who have “made their lives count for something.” Use the ideas in this book to help you make your dreams come true. I wish you success and know that you can make it happen.
– Wally “Famous” Amos, president, Uncle No Name Cookie Company

$16.95  Book Reviews

Ian Valz (1957-2010), a leading St. Martin playwright, actor, author, theater director, award-winning moviemaker. Masquerade is Valz’s three-act play, published by House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP) in 1988. In 1990, “Masquerade” was short listed for Guyana’s Literary Prize and beat out most of the candidates to be placed runner-up to the winning playwright Dr. Michael Gilkes. With good reviews in St. Martin, Guyana, Barbados and in The Caribbean Writer, director Ron Robinson set out from Guyana with a band of thespians from the international theater (TTI) and took “Masquerade” to Barbados, Antigua, and St. Kitts. His plays have also been performed in St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Jamaica. “Masquerade” was the first of at least five plays written by Valz in St. Martin, where he lived and worked since 1984. Born in Guyana in 1957, Valz was a key figure in transforming theater island-wide, working initially on stage and coordinating drama programs for the nation’s youth. His Teenage Acting Company and the groundbreaking Traditions drama festivals are arguably cornerstone contributions to the nation’s cultural development in the 1980s. The most extensive biographical profile about his work to date is found in the book St. Martin Massive! A Snapshot of Popular Artists (House of Nehesi Publishers, 2000). The drama lecturer for the HNP Creative Writing Course in 2003, Valz gave theater workshops and lectures in St. Martin and Guyana. Queen Beatrix of the Dutch kingdom knighted Valz in 2006 for his contributions to theater in the “island territory of St. Maarten”—the same year that his first movie The Panman: Rhythm of the Palms was released. The film, the island’s first full-length movie, won awards in 2008 from the Hollywood Black Film Festival and the Brooklyn International Film Festival. Since then the movie was a special feature of the Collectivity of St. Martin’s public movie night program. After a battle with cancer, Sir Ian Valz passed away on April 28, 2010 in St. Martin.

Author’s Book Details

Masquerade
A Play by Ian Valz

Paperback, poetry, 148 pp. Out of print

ISBN: 0-913441-06-6

Ian has woven a play of a Caribbean family in Guyana with skill, sensitivity and love. It is a clear insight into the politics of the country and the position of emerging countries, the battle of young consciousness, of the need for a political, social and economic identity laced with the flavor and love in the families expressed as only the Caribbean people can.Masquerade is a delight.
– Rufus Collins, Director of Interstage Theatre, Amsterdam, Netherlands

forthcoming  Book Reviews

Gerard van Veen, born in Alkmaar, The Netherlands in 1933, came to the Caribbean in 1961, where he played an active role in pastoral, social, educational and cultural fields, particularly of Aruba and St. Martin. Van Veen is the author of St Theresa’s, San Nicolas(1971), Savaneta, Antes y Awor (1974), Tur Cos a Cambia (1975) Religious Snapshots(1993), Ten Years of Struggle (1994), Colorful Religion (1999) and Lambee & The Road that Couldn’t be Built (2003). His articles and columns have appeared in the Newsday, The Chronicle and Daily Herald newspapers of St. Martin. After he retired as probation officer in 1993, he started teaching sociology and Dutch language at the University of St. Martin. Awards and honors include a Paul Harris Fellow from Rotary International and a Member in the Order of Oranje-Nassau. Hakuna Matata is a collection of travel stories, covering trips to Africa and Scandinavia, Mid-Europe and the Caribbean.

Author’s Book Details

Hakuna Matata & Other Travel Stories
by Gerard van Veen

Paperback, prose, travel, tourism, 94 pp.

ISBN: 978-0-913441-90-9

Immensely entertaining and informative. Gerard van Veen has that special gift … His stories introduce us to the art of traveling.
– Roger Snow, The Daily Herald

$15  Book Reviews

 

Colorful Religion – Mini-stories of the Caribbean Church  (1701 – 1998)
by Gerard van Veen

Paperback, 67 pp., 5.25″ x 8″

ISBN: 0-913441-31-7

Colorful Religion is a collection of mini-stories of the Caribbean church, particularly the Christian Communities of St. Martin, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Barths.

$10  Book Reviews

Luisa Angelica Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in sociology and Latin American history. Her master’s degree in education and post-graduate studies in cultural administration were obtained, respectively, from Columbia University and Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil. Vicioso has worked for various United Nations agencies —UNICEF, UNIFEM, INSTRAW, FNUAP—specializing in women development programs. She currently holds the title of Ambassador for Women, Children and Adolescent issues, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Dominican Republic. Between 1981 and 2005, Chiqui Vicioso authored 19 books, including five volumes of poetry; five plays; and six essays on women writers, literature, and education—notably Algo que decir (1992) (Something to Declare). She has also written the revealing seminal poetic biographies of Julia de Burgos, the national poet of Puerto Rico, Salomé Ureña, and Aída Cartagena Portalatín, two essential poetic voices of the Dominican Republic, and a biography of a Bolivian female urban guerrilla. Eva/Sion/s is the first book by this important Caribbean author to be published simultaneously in three languages. Awards and honors include the Anacaona de Oro in literature, the National Theater Prize of the Dominican Republic, and the Premio Casandra for the play Salomé U: cartas a una ausencia.

La autora

Luisa Angélica Sherezada Vicioso (Chiqui), nació en Santo Domingo, Republica Dominicana. Se graduó con una licenciatura en Historia Latinoamericana y Sociología de la universidad Brooklyn College, y tiene una maestría en educación de la Universidad de Columbia, y estudios de pos grado de la Fundación Getulio Vargas, Brazil. Vicioso ha trabajado para varias agencias de las Naciones Unidas, entre ellas UNICEF, UNIFEM, INSTRAW, y el Fondo de Población, como asesora y evaluadora de programas con la mujer. Entre 1981 y 2005, Chiqui Vicioso ha escrito unos 19 libros, incluyendo cinco poemarios, y dos libros de ensayos sobre literatura femenina, literatura y educación, entre los cuales se distingue el libro Algo que decir, ensayos sobre Literatura Femenina, cuya primera edición data del 1992. También ha escrito una biografía poética de Julia de Burgos, la poeta nacional de Puerto Rico; Salome Ureña de Henríquez y Aída Cartagena Portalatin, dos voces esenciales de la Republica Dominicana, asi como la biografía de una guerrillera boliviana. Eva/Sión/Es es el primer libro de esta importante autora caribeña que se publica simultáneamente en tres idiomas. Entre los premios que ha re-cibido están el Anacaona de Oro en Literatura; el Premio Nacional de Teatro de la Republica Dominicana y el Premio Casandra por la obra Salomé U: Cartas a una ausencia.

Sur l’auteur

Luisa Angelica Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso est née à Saint-Domingue en République Dominicaine. Elle a obtenu de la Faculté de Brooklyn une Licence de Sociologie et d’Histoire d’Amérique Latine. Elle fit sa maîtrise d’enseignement et ses études post-licence d’administration culturelle respectivement à l’Université de Columbia et à la Fondation Getulio Vargas au Brésil. Vicioso a travaillé dans plusieurs agences des Nations Unies — UNICEF, UNIFEM, INSTRAW, FNUAP — se spécialisant dans les programmes de développement pour les femmes. Elle est actuellement l’Ambassadrice pour les questions portant sur les Femmes, les Enfants et les Adolescents au Ministère des Affaires Etrangères de la République Dominicaine. Entre 1981 et 2005, Chiqui Vicio-so a publié 19 livres, y compris, cinq volumes de poésie; cinq pièces de théâtre; et six essais sur les femmes écrivains, la littérature et l’enseignement — notamment Algo que decir (1992). Elle a également rédigé la biographie poétique séminale et révélatrice de Julia de Burgos, poète national de Porto Rico, et de Salomé Ureña et de Aída Cartagena Portalatín, deux voix poétiques essentielles de la République Dominicaine; et la biographie d’une guérilla urbaine de femmes boliviennes. Éva/Sion/s est le premier ouvrage de cet auteur caribéen qui est publié simultanément en trois langues. Les prix et les distinctions remportés comprennent l’Anacaona de Oro de littérature, le Prix du Théâtre National de la République Dominicaine, et le Prix Casandra de la meilleure production théâtrale.

Author’s Book Details

Eva/Sión/Es
por Chiqui Vicioso

Poesía/literatura, 112 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-67-8

… Busca el origen de su isla natal y la poeta, ella misma es isla, tierra circundada de agua, ritmo y voz ceñidos de silencios. Herida, destrozada para mirarse, se reconoce, se reconstruye en la palabra. Ve todo aquello que es raíz y vuelo, lo rescata, lo toca, lo nombra. Se transita, viaja: florecen los signos y los mitos; se activan los rituales. En lo local se universaliza, en lo efímero siembra eternidad. Conmueve y trasciende.
– Adela Fernández, Cuentista mexicana

$15  Book Reviews

Mathias Sinclair Voges was born in Philipsburg, St. Martin in 1943. He is the ninth of twelve children born to Johannes Ricardo Voges and Theresa Winifred Augusta Voges-Lejuez. He obtained teaching diplomas from Peter Stuyvesant College, Curacao, and Rijkskweekschool, Maastricht, the Netherlands. In 1976, Voges earned his bachelor’s in social science in Aruba from the Leraren-opleiding. Between 1971 and 1981, he taught geography and biology at secondary schools in the Netherlands, Aruba, and Curacao. In 1981, Voges returned to his native island to become the MAVO principal at Milton Peters College (MPC) — located in Cul-de-Sac, which serves as “the setting” for this book. In 1987, having already served as general director of MPC, St. Martin’s largest high school at the time, the educator was appointed superintendent of Catholic schools for St. Martin, St. Eustatius, and Saba. Four years later, he became executive director of Catholic education in St. Martin. Between 1988 and 1994, he was instrumental in establishing the St. Dominic schools — St. Martin’s first English-language Catholic primary and high schools, in Cul-de-Sac. The chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Dutch funding agency Stichting Katholieke Noden in the Windward Islands is also secretary of the Emilio Wilson Cultural and Historical Foundation and a member of the St. Maarten Monument Preservation Foundation. A former president of the University of St. Martin Board of Directors, Voges is the author of Zusters Dominicanessen van Voorschoten 100 jaar op St. Maarten 1890-1990 (1990). Awards and honors include Officer in the Dutch royal Order of Oranje-Nassau and the Pro Eclessia Et Pontifice. In 1990, Voges was appointed Acting Lt. Governor of the Island territory St. Maarten, and was subsequently reappointed.

Author’s Book Details

Cul-de-Sac People – A St. Martin Family Series
by Mathias S. Voges

Family studies, 135 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-70-8

A first and fascinating labor of love and scholarship highlighting, in text and illustrations,
St. Martin’s people, history, culture and natural environment. Extensive bibliography.

$30  Book Reviews

Jennie Naomi Wheatley was born in 1939, in Tortola, Virgin Islands, where she received her early education. In 1960, she graduated from the Leeward Islands Teachers Training College in Antigua. After obtaining a B.A. (Honors English) and a B.Ed. from Canada’s Mt. Allison University in 1970, Wheatley pursued further training in education at England’s University of Leeds in 1981. For over forty years, Wheatley has taught primary and secondary schools throughout the Virgin Islands. The educator has served on the English Panel of the Caribbean Examinations Council and was a “marker” for several years. Since its inception in 1990, Wheatley has served on the Board of Governors and as an adjunct lecturer at H. Lavity Stoutt Community College. In 1993, Jennie Wheatley was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.) by Queen Elizabeth II for outstanding contribution to education and culture in the British Virgin Islands. Wheatley has co-authored Comprehension for Caribbean Examinations (Macmillan, 1979); and authored Boysie and The Genips and Other Stories (UNESCO, 1984), and the first edition of Pass It On !!! A Treasury of Virgin Island Tales (WSTD Publishing, 1991). In 1996 Wheatley was the assistant principal for academic affairs at B.V.I. High School and still found time to direct an oral history project “which seeks to record events and activities of the past as seen through the eyes of senior citizens.” Jennie Wheatley is married to Charles Wheatley and has three sons, Ludwis, Lloyd, and Leon.

 

Author’s Book Details

Pass It On! A Treasury of Virgin Islands Tales
by Jennie N. Wheatley

Paperback, poetry, 92 pp.
ISBN: 0-913441-26-0

These stories will help us … evoke that spirit of adventure for which our forbears were well known and which our younger generation would wish to follow.
– Ralph O’Neal, Chief Minister, British Virgin Islands

$10Book Reviews

The life of a happy, playful child is suddenly turned upside-down when it is discovered that her kidneys are “not working.” Her parents are told that she will not survive. A minister appears at her hospital bed to say a final prayer. How did it all turn around?Because of Prayer is a diary-style story of bio-snapshots linked by tremendous pain, family sacrifice and love, and the enduring faith of a life still in progress. Felecita “Cita” Williams was born and grew up on the island of St. Martin.

 

Author’s Book Details

Because of Prayer
by Felecita T. Williams

ISBN: 0-913441-68-6

There was a little girl on Curaçao (originally from St. Maarten) who was suffering from serious kidney failure, as a result of “Nephritic Syndrome.” Moreover, it was revealed that she was seriously ill in an isolation room.
– Dr. E.D. Wolff, Sophia Kinderziekenhuis, The Netherlands

$20  Book Reviews

Cynthia Wilson was born in St. Philip, Barbados in 1934. She graduated from the University College of the West Indies, Jamaica, with a B.A. in history, Latin and English in 1957, followed with a Diploma in Education in 1958. Wilson worked as a high school English teacher in Jamaica and Morocco, before returning home in 1969, and serving in Barbados’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Caribbean Tourism Research Centre. She was instrumental in establishing the National Independence Festival of creative Arts (NIFCA) in 1973, and for nearly thirty years has been representing her country and the cultural arts on national, regional and international boards, committees and fora in dance, theater and tourism. The president of Stage One Theatre Productions (1980-1982), manager of the Barbados Dance Theatre Company (1985-1988) and administrative director of WWB Productions (1986-1996), Wilson has also served as chairperson of the Association of Caribbean Theatre Artists (ACTA) and a director of the CARICOM Foundation for Arts and Culture. She is a member of numerous other cultural foundations, including the Barbados mu-seum and historical society. Fluent in French and Spanish, she is well-known in Barbados and other parts of the Caribbean as an actor, storyteller, producer and dancer. As one of Barbados’ grandes dames of the cultural arts, Wilson has produced “Paint it Jazz” for the Barbados Jazz Festival (1994-1995), as well as the official presentations for royal visits and visiting dignitaries and heads of state (1975-1990), and nu-merous dance, musical and theater productions. In 1998, this wife and mother of three founded her nation’s Stroke Support Group. The writing of poetry and stories has been a consistent but mostly private part of Wilson’s life and professional career and “Same Sea . Another Wave” is her first book and the fruit of a long-standing dream. Awards and honors include the Barbados Service Star, the Bussa Award, University of the West Indies at Cave Hill Humanities Scholar, University of the West Indies at Mona Distinguished Graduate Award, and the Earl Warner Trust Lifetime Achievement Award.

Author’s Book Details

Same Sea … Another Wave – A collection of stories
by Cynthia Wilson

Paperback, fiction, short stories 65 + xii pp., 5.25″ x 8″

ISBN: 0-913441-53-8

“In Cynthia Wilson’s Same Sea … Another Wave Cyrilene Sargeant takes us into her world with all the unstoppable confidence of a precocious, deeply loved child. … Caribbean writers do explore childhood, of course, but there are few who evoke so beautifully and completely credibly, a childhood in the Caribbean in an era that we can now see as the childhood of the modern Caribbean.”
– Kendel Hippolyte, Poet, playwright, St Lucia

$15  Book Reviews

Ingrid Zagers published Images of Me (1993), her first book of poems, not long after completing high school at the St. Maarten Academy. The Saban-born Zagers would be the first of three promising young women poets to publish a first volume in St. Martin during the 1990s. Literary critic Joyce Peters-McKenzie said Images of Me “woos us like a meadow in springtime … fresh, colorful, compelling, warm.” The collection was itself a coming-of-age testimonial of the poetess who now lives in St. Martin.

Author’s Book Details

Images of Me
by Ingrid Zagers

Paperback, poetry, 107 pp.

ISBN: 0-913441-12-0

Ingrid Zager’s collection of verse is a serious attempt to understand the complex nature of man and his environment at a time when the writer’s youth seems trapped in a physical/social bind.
– Joyce Peters-McKenzie, literary critic, St. Vincent

$10  Book Reviews