Caribbean Writer

For immediate release:

PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, 2 MAY, 2008: The Caribbean Review of Books (CRB), the quarterly magazine covering Caribbean books, writing, art, and culture, celebrates the fourth anniversary of its revival with its May 2008 issue.

“The May issue, at sixty pages, will be our biggest yet,” wrote editor Nicholas Laughlin at Antilles, the magazine’s weblog. “I also feel it’s one of the strongest we’ve published so far.”

He added: “Looking back at the sixteen issues we’ve published … I’m pleased to note the ways in which the magazine has grown — in size, scope, subject matter — but also that we’ve remained faithful to the original aim, the original ideal: to provide a forum for serious but not solemn discussion of Caribbean books and writing for an audience of avid, curious readers.”

This latest issue of the CRB contains full reviews of sixteen new and recent books, including studies of C.L.R. James, books by emerging Caribbean poets, a collection of essays by Guyana-born scholar Gordon Rohlehr, a memoir by Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, a biography of Trinidad-born activist Claudia Jones, a collection of short stories by Jamaican writer Sharon Leach, and a book of photographs of Afro-Cuban religious rituals.

It also features tributes to the late Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, an excerpt from the forthcoming memoirs of the late Montserrat-born poet E.A. Markham, a profile of the Barbadian writer and editor Frank Collymore, new poems by Fred D’Aguiar and Sassy Ross, and pieces on contemporary Caribbean art.

The original Caribbean Review of Books was founded in 1991 by the University of the West Indies Publishers’ Association (UWIPA) in Mona, Jamaica. Edited by Samuel B. Bandara, it ran to eleven quarterly issues before ceasing publication in 1994. In 2004, the CRB was revived by the publishing house Media and Editorial Projects (MEP) in Port of Spain, Trinidad, under Laughlin’s editorship. In early 2007, the CRB was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity and now receives major support from the Prince Claus Fund.

May 2008 is also the first anniversary of the launch of Antilles (www.antilles.blogspot.com), the CRB blog, which offers regular news about Caribbean writing and art, out-takes from the print magazine, and web-only content such as interviews and short essays. The CRB’s entire archive is freely available at the magazine’s main website, www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com.

Highlights from the May 2008 CRB:

• Brendan de Caires reviews C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King, by Dave Renton, and Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society, by Frank Rosengarten. “James read cricket, and nearly everything else, in terms of tradition and the individual talent,” writes de Caires. “When he wrote about it, his inner novelist tended to overwhelm the historian, but they often worked in tandem, recording an experience, then, unobtrusively, decoding it.”

• Vahni Capildeo reviews New Caribbean Poetry, an anthology edited by Kei Miller, including the work of eight emerging poets; plus American Fall, by Raymond Ramcharitar, and There Is an Anger that Moves, by Kei Miller. “Miller has found the word made flesh in eight poets,” writes Capildeo. “Ramcharitar’s American Fall is a book of deep and defensive melancholy.” She also notes “Miller’s astounding, open-hearted, by wryly clear-eyed complexity of viewpoint.”

• Anu Lakhan reviews Transgression, Transition, and Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture, by Gordon Rohlehr. These essays, she says, “have everything … to do with mapping and building. The building of nations and self-definitions.”

• Shara McCallum reviews From Harvey River, a new memoir by Lorna Goodison. The book, McCallum suggests, “lends insights into a people, a place, and a way of being in the world that is little treated in literature.”

• Mervyn Morris reviews Impossible Flying, a book of poems, and A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock, a memoir, both by Kwame Dawes. The two books “extend each other,” Morris writes. “A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock will reward anyone interested in … the mind and development of Kwame Dawes, the black diaspora, or the writing life.”

Plus:

• Jeremy Taylor on Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, by Carol Boyce Davies.

• Bridget Brereton on Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian, by Maureen Warner-Lewis.

• Simon Lee on Crossing the Water: A Photographic Guide to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World, by Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh.

• Mark Lyndersay on Days of Wrath: The 1990 Coup in Trinidad and Tobago, by Raoul Pantin.

• Nicholas Laughlin on What You Can’t Tell Him, a collection of short stories by Sharon Leach.

• Jonathan Ali on In Search of Buccaneers, a history of pirates in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.

• Tributes to Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) by Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and J. Michael Dash.

• “Remembering London”, an excerpt from a forthcoming memoir by E.A. Markham (1939–2008).

• An essay by Edward Baugh on Frank Collymore, Bim, and the making of West Indian literature.

• Melanie Archer on Golden Glance, an exhibition of paintings by Rachel Amy Rochford.

• A portfolio of images from Curator’s Eye III, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica.

• Poems by Fred D’Aguiar and Sassy Ross.

Editor: Nicholas Laughlin Publisher: Jeremy Taylor

Contributing editors: Jonathan Ali, Vahni Capildeo, Christopher Cozier, Brendan de Caires, Anu Lakhan

Editorial board: David Dabydeen, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, Jane King, Ian McDonald, Annie Paul, Kim Robinson Walcott, Olive Senior

ISSN: 1811-4873

Frequency: quarterly (February, May, August, November)

Circulation: 1,200

Distribution: via subscription, and through selected bookshops in the Caribbean and metropolitan cities with major Caribbean populations; also through selected literary and arts festivals and conferences

For further information on The Caribbean Review of Books, please contact:

6 Prospect Avenue, Maraval, Trinidad and Tobago

T: (868) 622 3821    F: (868) 628 0639

E: crb[@]meppublishers.com

www.caribbeanreviewofbooks.com