Kedon Willis will take over the JWIL Twitter feed from Nov 15-22, 2021 to celebrate Jamaica Kincaid’s colossal impact on Caribbean writing by highlighting her devotion to telling Caribbean stories and her resistance to limits on how those stories could be told. Throughout the week, Kedon will spotlight media on how the author, in building her career, pushed against boundaries surrounding the depiction of women’s lives and their relationships, the conventions of the autobiographical genre, and the notion of Caribbean identity. In so doing, the residency will serve as a modest repository of the Kincaid’s fearlessness, ingenuity, and wit. The residency will also act as a digital analogue for City College of New York’s celebration of the legacy of Jamaica Kincaid on November 18. For info on that event, see https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/lhf/lhf-2021-celebrates-jamaica-kincaid
Kedon Willis (@KedonWillis) is an assistant professor of English at CUNY City College where he teaches Caribbean and Latin American literature. His areas of interest include comparative Caribbean literature and queer theory, and his research examines the evolution (and limits) of queer liberation in the writings of contemporary queer authors of Caribbean heritage. Kedon’s scholarship, creative writing and journalism has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Florida Review, Pree Magazine, the Wall Street Journal Magazine and the History Channel.