Spotlight on gay writers from across the Caribbean

In the spotlight will be the publication A Reading from Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. Glave is a Professor of Creative Writing, English, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at SUNY Binghamton.

There will be an open discussion and reading by featured speakers Colin Robinson and Lawrence Scott, as well as an IGDS book sale and signing. Only cash would be accepted for purchase of books on the night. The books will also be available at the UWI Bookstore, St Augustine Campus after the event.

The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles Published by Duke University Press, 2008, is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles.

Glave has gathered outstanding fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers together with selections by internationally celebrated figures such as Jos? Alc?ntara Alm?nzar, Reinaldo Arenas, Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, Achy Obejas, and Assotto Saint. The result is an unprecedented literary conversation on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered experiences throughout the Caribbean and its far-flung diaspora. Many selections were originally published in Spanish, Dutch, or creole languages; some are translated into English here for the first time.

The 37 authors hail from the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St Vincent, St Kitts, Suriname and Trinidad. Many have lived outside the Caribbean, and their writings depict histories of voluntary migration as well as exile from the repressive governments, communities, and families. Many pieces have a political urgency that reflect their author’s work as activists, teachers, community organisers, and performers. Desire commingles with ostracism and allegation throughout: in the evocative portrayals of same-sex love and longing, and in the selections addressing religion, family, race, and class.

From the poem “Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors” to the poignant narrative “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” to an eloquent call for the embrace of difference that appeared in the Nassau Daily Tribune on the eve of an anti-gay protest, Our Caribbean is a brave and necessary book.

Contributors are Jos? Alc?ntara Alm?nzar, Aldo Alvarez, Reinaldo Arenas, Rane Arroyo, Jes?s, R Erica Doyle, Thomas Glave, Rosamond S King, Helen Klonaris, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Audre Lorde, Shani Mootoo, Anton Nimblett, Achy Obejas, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, V irgilio Pi?era, Patricia Powell, Kevin Everod Quashie, Juanita Ramos, Colin Robinson, Assotto Saint, Andrew Salkey, Lawrence Scott, Maikeda Silvera, H Nigel Thomas, Rinaldo Walcott, Gloria Wekker and Lawson Williams.

“Our Caribbean is a superb anthology. Thomas Glave does not exaggerate when he writes that this is ‘a book that I and others have been waiting for and have wanted for all our lives.’ Here we have a book that makes literal the ongoing necessity to write ‘against silence.’”

— Elizabeth Alexander, author of American Blue: Selected Poems said,

“Traversing boundaries of geography, history, language and desire, Thomas Glave has assembled a poignant testament of how we dare to love differently and yearn for justice in the same breath....Necessary and timely.”

— M Jacqui Alexander, author of Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred said.

Glave is the author of Whose song? And Other Stories; the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, a Lambda Literary Award winner; and the forthcoming short fiction collection, The Torturer’s Wife.

Born to Jamaican parents in the Bronx and raised there and in Jamaica, Glave is a founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG). He is a teacher in the English Department at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr Visiting Professor in the Programme in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.