Sarah Venable (second from left) and Sonia Williams (second from right) and friends: celebrating the livity.  Photo Copyright © 2024 by Sarah Venable. 

SONIA WILLIAMS was the hyphen queen. As poet-writer-actor-director-mentor-speaker-educator-scholar, she lit up spaces across the Caribbean community. But as much as those hyphens trace the organic shape of her creative life, they also slashed it into parcels.

George Lamming, 1927-2022.  Photo Copyright © 2002 by Ronnie Carrington.

HOW IMPORTANT is a book, any book?  To any one person, people, time, or place?

Montreal writer, educator and community activist Horace I. Goddard had a commitment to community first nurtured in Barbados.  Photo Copyright © 2020 by Kola.

HORACE I. GODDARD was to many a well-regarded Montreal writer.  Among his books were the novel Child of the Jaguar Spirit (2009) and The Long Drums (1986), a poetry collection. His short story “In the Light of Darkness” appeared in Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (2011), edited by Cyril Dabydeen.

Kamau Brathwaite, widely acclaimed as Barbados’ greatest poet, and certainly one of the giants of Caribbean Literature, whose writings spanned literary criticism, drama, history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and more, died Tuesday, February 4, where his navel string was buried.  He was 89 and would have been 90 on May 11.  For decades, many considered Kamau Barbados’ unofficial poet laureate.  Then, in 2018, the nation finally appointed its first poet laureate, Esther Phillips.  In the following editorial, reprinted from the Spring 2018 issue of Kola, No. 30, Vol.

Barbadian spoken-word artist Adrian Green: following in the tradition of pioneering Bajan writers A.N. Forde, W.S. Arthur and Karl Sealy.  Photo Copyright © 2013 by Fresh Milk Barbados.

Part of “Caribbean poetry’s new wave”: Ishion Hutchinson, Safiya Sinclair and Rajiv Mohabir.  Photo Copyright © 2017 by Bocas Lit Fest.

MAKE NO MISTAKE, the NGC Bocas Lit Fest out of Trinidad’s Port of Spain is big. It describes itself in this, its seventh year, as “the Caribbean’s biggest festival of words, stories and ideas.” Each year that the festival flexes its literary muscles, they are larger than they were in the previous one.