I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and I attended Mona Primary and Jamaica College, where I studied literature under the tutelage of Dennis Scott. When I left Jamaica in 1979, I went to Miami Dade College and after graduating, I studied Caribbean, African and African-American literature with Dr. O.R. Dathorne and creative writing with Lester Goran, Evelyn Wilde Mayerson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Since then, I have attended workshops with Derek Walcott , Edward Albee, and Israeli playwright, Matti Meged. As a James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami, I studied poetry under Kamau Brathwaite and fiction with George Lamming.

In 1990, I published my first book of poems, Exodus and Other Poems, and four other poetry collections have followed: Florida Bound (1985), hurricane center (1998), xango music (2001), and Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas (2005). I have also written a book of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien (1997), and a novel, Benjamin, My Son (2003) which was set in Jamaica during the turbulent eighties—a time of gang and class warfare, mass exodus, and the emergence of reggae, Rastafari and Bob Marley. I am currently working on a book of short stories, “Who’s Your Daddy?” and Other Stories, and a novel, “Song for the Shulamite,” which is set in South Florida. The major stars of the novel are a hurricane, a missing daughter, and a Rastaman—kind of Zora Neale Hurston meets South Florida and Jamaica.

I’ve also won several awards and nominations for my work including an International IMPAC Dublin Award (Nomination) 2005, Dublin, Ireland; Sauza “Stay Pure” Award 2000; Florida Individual Artist Fellowship 1997, Florida Department of State, Tallahassee, Florida; “Escape to Create” 1995, Seaside Institute; Canute Brodhurst Prize 1993, The Caribbean Writer, University of the Virgin Islands, and James Michener Fellowships, 1990-1992, University of Miami.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve worked as a Poet-in-the Schools with Dade County Public Schools, taught English, drama, and journalism at West Miami Middle School, freshman composition at the University of Miami, and nearly every English course at Miami Dade College where I am now the chairperson of the College Prep. Department. As I have learned, I have passed on the knowledge I have gleaned by giving readings from my work and conducting creative writing workshops in the US, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom.

I am available for “Meet the Author” readings from my work and intense weekend creative writing workshops/lectures. To contact me, please e-mail geoffreyphilp101 [at] gmail.com.

I hope you have enjoyed reading Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot.

Blessings,

Geoffrey

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

Welcome author, Stewart Kunaka, talking about his new poetry book called “Freedom is only a thought away” to the Black Reading Group:

Question and answer sessions
Book signings/more readings and poetry

We are also privileged to have Angela & Golda from Maat Natural Health Products & Services talking about Complementary Health; could they heal you and improve your health and well-being?

Come along on the 15th May to find out more! Question and answer session on health etc
Everyone is welcome! We look forward to seeing you!
Contact: Sonia 01922 653137 or: dixons [@] walsall.gov.uk

The novel is an interweaving of two tales of events leading up to, and shortly after societal upheavals in two countries. One is a tale of a slave revolt in Guyana (1823); the other is a tale of a coup in contemporary Nigeria. The narrator (a writer) is a Guyanese immigrant in Nigeria who is married to a Nigerian, and is pregnant with her second child.

The interweaving of the two tales succeeds as an artistic way of making a political statement about unjust societies. The narrator/writer at first appears to struggle to hold the two tales apart as they unfold, and then gives in to the similarities, and allows them to meld.

The novel makes startling and not-so-startling comparisons between a slave society, and contemporary Nigeria. But what makes it a compelling read is the narrator/writer whose anxieties over the novel she is writing, the child she is carrying, her questions about religion, her role as a wife, and her upper-class life in a sharply stratified society keep you wondering page after page if she would eventually lose it.

At one point she says, “maybe my pregnancy hormones are skidaddling all over the place. Yes, that must be the reason why I’m eye-focused conscious and eye-blind unconscious, out of control and in control all at the same time” (Hangman’s Game, p.69). If you’ve ever been pregnant (or lived with a pregnant woman) you’d completely understand where she’s coming from.

The novel illustrates the frighteningly escalating and deflating parallel states of pregnancy, and societal change. The narrator’s pregnant state (in that sense) can be recognized as analogous to the expectations, uncertainties, and the precarious mix of life and death that exist in the two largely unjust societies she writes about.

The Hangman’s Game is a fascinating read. It is finely-paced, well-dramatized, and politically assertive.

Courttia Newland was born in 1973 to parents of Caribbean heritage. In 1997 he published his first novel, The Scholar. Further critically acclaimed work followed, including Society Within (1999), and Snakeskin (2002). He is the editor of the anthology IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000) and has short stories featured in many other anthologies including The Time Out Book of London Short Stories and England Calling. His latest books include a novella, The Dying Wish, and a book of short stories, Music for the Off-Key (both 2006). 

In 2007 Courttia was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library award for a body of work. He has just completed his latest novel, Minx.

Courttia Newland Books on Amazon.com

Signifyin’ Guyana: Drums, a musical saw, hilarious stories, poetry, call and response moments, songs of Guyana, prayers by a Pandit, an Imam, and leaders from several Christian denominations, and of course Ol’ Higue, Backoo, and Jumbie were all part of the celebratory tributes in a home-going service for Wordsworth McAndrew yesterday evening.
It was a celebration befitting a man who embraced and informed many of all aspects of Guyanese culture.

The work of THE ARTS FORUM is to hold art exhibitions, organize lectures, workshops, seminars and other related activities that might increase awareness of the relevance of the humanities, art and culture to individual growth and development and, hence, to national life.

The Arts Forum Inc. was incorporated as an independent non-profit company in 2004 when its work was broadened with the publication of THE ARTS JOURNAL, the first critical journal of the Arts in Guyana

The Arts Journal is a peer-reviewed critical Journal published twice yearly in single issues or once yearly in a double issue.

The Arts Journal is devoted to the critical and scholarly study of the written literatures, the oral traditions, the visual culture and cultural expressions of Guyana, the wider Caribbean and their Diasporas. It is hoped that the Journal will contribute towards deepening our understanding of ourselves as products and inheritors of rich and diverse civilizations who share a complex history of struggle for selfhood and, above all, a common humanity.

The editors invite submission of articles that critically examine the history, the literary, visual and cultural traditions and artefacts of Guyana and the Caribbean, as well as book reviews and creative writing.

Submissions for consideration should be sent as E-mail attachments in MSWord File Format version 2001 or earlier to ameenagf [@] guyana.net.gy in addition to three (3) hard copies by post to the Editor, with the author’s name, postal and e-mail addresses on a separate sheet of paper. All submissions should be in English and no longer than 5,000 words. A one-page abstract (250 words) should accompany each article as well as a brief biography (50 words or less). Notes must be gathered at the end of the manuscript, and should conform to accepted styles and conventions for academic writing in the discipline. Unused manuscripts will be returned if pre-paid envelopes are enclosed.

All correspondence and books for review should be addressed to: The Editor, The Arts Journal, 48 Eping Avenue, Georgetown, Guyana, South America Telephone: (592) 227 6825; Fax: (592) 225 0712.

For information about orders and subscriptions, please click here

The Arts Journal is published by The Arts Forum Inc. with Registered Offices at 48 Eping Avenue, Bel Air Park, Georgetown, Guyana, South America.

We have just received a card from Norman Markham informing that there will be a memorial service for Archie at Upper Tooting Methodist Church, 290 Balham High Street, London SW17.

It will take place on Friday 9th of May at 12.00 noon.
Nearest tube: Tooting Bec.

Best wishes
Jeremy Poynting

The following is from the Peepal Tree Press Condolence page

 We received a great many heartfelt responses to the news of Archie’s death. Archie was cremated at a small private ceremony in Paris on Monday 14th of April. There will undoubtedly be an event at some point in the future to celebrate Archie’s life and we will circulate any information as soon as we have it.