Current Issue

We at JWIL mourn the premature passing of Professor Jennifer Rahim (UWI - St. Augustine). Her work is part of a rich tradition of gifted Caribbean writers who were also brilliant scholars. Her commitment to teaching and mentorship of Caribbean students and newer writers continues to bear fruit. A poet as well as writer of fiction and criticism, she was the winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for her 2017 fiction collection, Curfew Chronicles. A prolific writer, her... Read more

Hosted by the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus (Kingston, Jamaica), the 41st Annual West Indian Literature Conference invites papers and panel proposals that explore the critical connections in Caribbean literary and cultural studies. With this year’s focus on connections, the conference seeks to bring together academics, postgraduate students, creative practitioners, secondary school educators, and the general public to both critically assess the literature and celebrate the... Read more

Join us between February 13-20 for another JWIL Twitter residency! Alexis Pauline Gumbs (@alexispauline) will be sharing about the life and work of Audre Lorde whose birthday is on February 18th. Alexis will be focusing on poems Lorde wrote in the volume The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance while living in St. Croix at the end of her life. Alexis will be choosing a poem from that collection for each day, sharing a favorite line or two and tweeting about how they reflect on Lorde's eternal... Read more

JWIL honors the loss and the lasting legacy of UWI Professor Emeritus Gordon Rohlehr, native son of Guyana, public intellectual, dedicated teacher and mentor, and eminent scholar of calypso and Caribbean popular culture and literature. His lifelong commitment to elucidating the unique cultural offerings and gifts of the Caribbean are to be found in his greatly influential and prolific body of work which ranges from Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1981),... Read more

Join us for our first JWIL Twitter residency of 2023. From January 23-30, Jovanté Anderson (@KingstonJancro) will be tweeting @jwilonline about the poetry of Claude McKay. Anderson will invite us to meditate on the riotous intimacies in Claude McKay's under-discussed second book of poetry, Constab Ballads, particularly its queer valences. Each day, we will do a close reading of one poem and we will also engage interesting secondary material from his life. Bio: Jovanté Anderson is a... Read more

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for its inaugural week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at the University of Miami in June 2023. The CDSC supports the growth and development of digital humanities scholarship, training, and infrastructure for the Caribbean and its diasporas. The Caribbean Digital Scholarship summer institute (CDSsi) will train scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies and digital... Read more

Join us from December 12-19, 2022 for Cornel Bogle's  JWIL Twitter residency which focuses on the work of the Barbadian-Canadian writer Austin Clarke, one of the first Black writers to be published in Canada. Though primarily read and studied as a writer of fiction and memoirs, Clarke was also a journalist, academic, and poet. This week, Bogle will be sharing some of his ongoing research for his manuscript-in-progress, Austin Clarke and the Black Radical Tradition, wherein he argues that,... Read more

Join us from November 14-21, 2022 when Kim Evelyn will share reflections on teaching Caribbean Literature at @jwilonline. In an increasingly distracting world pulling our students’ attention in different directions, it can feel like a struggle to keep students engaged in the close reading work of literary studies and foster their appreciation for literary texts. Fortunately, the world of Caribbean literature and cultural studies is rich with compelling texts, controversial ideas, radical... Read more