Current Issue

JWIL is the proud recipient of the 2025 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters. We extend our deep thanks to the Bocas Lit Fest team for honoring our work in this way. This is indeed wind at our backs as we herald the 40th year of the JWIL project, fruit of multiple generations of labor and commitment. Below you will find the very generous commendation from the Bocas team. Please support Bocas in turn as they continue to nurture and sustain Caribbean... Read more

We inaugurate this new JWIL blog with Michael R. Soriano reflecting upon the launch of the exciting new digital publishing initiative Machineel + Seagrape, an open-access journal founded by Kelly Baker Josephs and dedicated to the publication of Caribbean plays. As we approach the fortieth anniversary of the JWIL project, which was founded in 1986, we are looking backwards with an impulse to preserve the record of work that has gone before to build the field of Caribbean literary studies, as... Read more

The University of Miami, Coral Gables, Department of English & Creative Writing and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies invites submissions of abstracts for the 43rd Annual West Indian Literature Conference to be held October 8-11, 2025. Today, Caribbean societies and, by extension, Caribbean writers, reckon with crises that feel both new and cyclical. Increased volcanic activities, record-breaking hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves are only some of the environmental pressures we face. States... Read more

We honor the Jamaican scholar and writer Velma Pollard's life and her invaluable contributions to Caribbean literary culture and education. She was retired from the University of the West Indies, Mona where she was Dean of the Faculty of Education. Over her decades of teaching in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the US, she trained many students, including J. Michael Dash and Victor Chang, who would go on to have their own lasting impact on Caribbean letters. Her scholarship explored the richness... Read more

The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) invites applications for their week-long residential digital humanities institute, to be held at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, in June 2025. 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) trains scholars, at all levels, working at the intersections of Caribbean Studies... Read more

The Journal of West Indian Literature joins many in celebrating the life and writing of Maryse Condé, the dynamic Guadeloupean author who passed away on April 2, 2024 at the age of 90. Her prolific and globally-recognized body of work offered postcolonial feminist perspectives informed by her peripatetic life led across the Caribbean, Africa, Western Europe and the US. Among the many awards she gathered in her lifetime were two major honors by France - a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor in... Read more

We at JWIL honor the memory and legacy of the Guyanese writer, Rooplall Monar (1945-2024). A poet, novelist and short story writer, Monar’s work, which centers a rich Guyanese creole, paints vivid pictures of Indo-Guyanese lives on the terrain of the sugar estates and elsewhere. Part of the influential Messenger group of Guyanese writers, Monar’s 1985 Backdam People, with its humor, orality and poignancy, remains essential reading for its portrayal of Indo-Guyanese sugar estate workers in... Read more

The 2024 Caribbean Digital Virtual Artist’s Residency The Caribbean Digital (TCD) and Alice Yard invite applications for their annual virtual residency program for artists of the Caribbean and its diasporas who work in digital media. The residency aims to facilitate the development of new artworks in digital media that investigate ideas and practices in Caribbean Digital Humanities and engage with scholars in the TCD network and community. The residency is offered in conjunction with the... Read more