Monthly Archives: February 2023

Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Twitter residency on the work of Audre Lorde (Feb 13-20, 2023)

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 life and Caribbean poetics.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (@alexispauline)  is a cherished oracle and community-accountable queer Black feminist author and scholar. She is a granddaughter of the Anguillian revolution, an aspirational cousin to all life, an exuberant facilitator, student, mentor and educator. Devoted listener and multi-dimensional archivist, Alexis honors Black feminism as a spiritual tradition, a political legacy and a relevant resource for everyone on the planet. Alexis is co-founder of MOBILE HOMECOMING, where she partners with Sangodare to connect generations of LGBTQ Black Visionaries to each other in a myriad of tangible ways that constitute an experiential archive of sustainable brilliance. Author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, Alexis is an experimental writer whose textual ceremonies transform her community’s sense of possibility. Creative Writing Editor at Feminist Studies, Writing Matters! series co-editor for Duke University Press, 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and 2022 Whiting Award Winner in non-fiction, Alexis activates language to connect us to the constant presence of generations of love.

JWIL mourns the passing of Prof. Gordon Rohlehr (1942-2023)

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), Cultural Resistance and the Guyana State (1984), Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (1990), My Strangled City and Other Essays (1992), The Shape of That Hurt and Other Essays (1992), A Scuffling of Islands: Essays on Calypso (2004), Transgression, Transition, Transformation: Essays in Caribbean Culture (2007), Ancestories: Readings of Kamau Brathwaite’s Ancestors (2010), My Whole Life is Calypso: Essays on Sparrow (2015), Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades (2019), and Musings, Mazes, Margins: A Memoir (2020).

Rohlehr’s rich path as “warrior against amnesia” and “historian of the spirit” of the Caribbean’s people is captured beautifully here in Richard Drayton’s tribute to him in Guyana’s Stabroek News and in the memorial service in his honor on 4 February 2023.