RIPPED JEANS (or the story I ought to write)

(Email to the Editors)
"[These are] three photos taken when I was a student at UWI, Mona, in 2006 and Kamau came to launch Born to Slow Horses an evening in the open air. It was my first time meeting him in the flesh. The photos aren't particularly special, but I cherish them for different reasons: the great man, a younger me, and there in the background a few friends, one of whom, Noelle, is now a wonderful writer from the Bahamas. I am sending them to you because I looked at them when your notice came, thought they'd be something for you to consider. I was about to enter NYU, and in one of the pictures Kamau is writing his NYC contact for me to visit him. That moved me greatly.... In the end, I don't think they carry any 'story' other than the one I ought to write. So they are only for you to take a look at, see that I wore ripped jeans at one point in my life."

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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Jamaica. His poetry collection, Far District (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Fellow Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.