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.

Artist Joshua Clarke's short video on the creation of the cover illustration for Cyndi Celeste's Girl Before Country.

You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too, yeah
The Beatles, “Birthday”

I ALMOST MISSED my own party.

Party?

Nah.  More like the entire birthday.

It was my business partner and partner in literary activism, Linda M. Deane, who had to point out the date.

“So…what are we doing about our twenty years?”

Say what?

When?

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.

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.