The conference is a collaboration between the Institute for Gender and Development Studies – Regional Coordinating Office (IGDS –RCO) and the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS).

The IGDS – RCO Brief Description

The Regional Coordinating Office (RCO) is the administrative hub of the regional Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) and coordinates the regional activities of the three Campus-Based Units, the Mona Campus Unit (MCU), the Nita Barrow Unit (NBU), and the St. Augustine Unit (SAU), including convening meetings of the Unit Heads, the Management Committee and the yearly Regional Planning and Strategy Committee (RPSC) meetings; consulting with the Campus-Based Units on policy formulation and project management; developing and coordinating regional research projects; facilitating collaboration among Campus-Based Units on matters of teaching, research, outreach, publications and conferences; and coordinating the establishment of collaborative relationships with regional and multi-lateral institutions on behalf of the IGDS.

In addition, the RCO runs a Graduate Programme and plays an active role in the development of gender-sensitive policies and programmes at the national, regional, and international levels. The RCO also provides technical advice to multi-lateral, governmental, and non-governmental agencies on several projects and programmes.

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ACWWS

Brief Description

The Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS) was formed in 1994 to continue the momentum sparked by the 1988 Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars Conference organized by Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe (then of ), and thereby advance creative writing and critical work by and about Caribbean women. ACWWS still celebrates and circulates the literature, orature, and literary scholarship of Caribbean women, but has expanded to include multidisciplinary research about Caribbean women, gender, and sexuality. The organization strives to provide a forum for critical examinations of this wide body of work; increase awareness of the Caribbean diaspora; and foster a climate of cooperation among all linguistic and cultural groups of the Caribbean. Please visit our website: www.acwws.org Executive Committee + affiliations:

Giselle Liza Anatol, President Professor, English, University of Kansas

Meredith Gadsby, Immediate Past President Associate Professor, Africana Studies,

Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Vice President Associate Professor, Florida International University

Rhonda Frederick, Secretary Associate Professor, English and African & African Diaspora Studies, Boston College

Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Treasurer Professor, African American Studies and Sociology, The College of New Jersey

Opal Palmer Adisa, Publications Editor Professor & University Director, The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, RCO, The University of the West Indies, Mona

Vicki Silvera, Archivist, Permanent Collections Libraries, Florida International University

Juliet Emanuel George, Archivist, Acquisitions Associate Professor, Borough of Manhattan Community College [CUNY]

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Conference Planning Team

IGDS – RCO’s Team

Conference Co-Char, Professor Opal Palmer Adisa, University Director, IGDS – RCO, The UWI.

Professor Opal Palmer Adisa, is the University Director of The Institute for Gender and Development Studies, of the UWI, located in the Regional Office, The University of the West Indies, Mona, , oversees the IGDS units at Mona, Cave Bill and St Augustine UWI campuses. A gender specialist, cultural activist and writer, Adisa believes that literature and the performance arts are the best approaches to interrogate and formulate an approach to gender justice; and she has been doing this through her poetry and stories. Her first short story collection, Bake - Face and Other Guava Stories , 1987, Illuminates the lives of working class Jamaican women who are victims of child sexual and physical abuse, domestic violence and other social strictures. Until Judgment Comes, 2009, a collection of 7 stories about Jamaican men, examines the problematic relationship some men have with their mothers and the childhood abuse that thwart their emotional development. Adisa has published 20 books; her essays, poetry and stories have been collected in over 400 journals and her plays which explore these social issues have been performed in California, New York, St Croix, Barbados and Jamaica, Egypt & .

Professor Adisa continues to excavate these themes in her work as she strives for Gender Justice. She headed the Diversity Studies department at California College of the Arts, for a decade, where she taught from 1992-2016. Adisa lectures and facilitates workshops on: and gender equality, Gender-based violence in the Caribbean, Parenting the Child(ren) You Have: Parenting Workshop 101, The Writers as Cultural Activist and Striving from Gender Justice, Writing to Bring About Gender Justice, Ending Child Abuse and Advocating for Children’s Rights, Caribbean Masculinity and Fatherhood & Urban Youth.

Other Team Members

Dr. Dalea Bean is a Lecturer and Graduate Coordinator at the IGDS – RCO, The UWI. Her general research interests include women and gender justice in Caribbean history, women in conflict situations, and gender relations in the Caribbean hotel industry and Caribbean masculinities. Her first single-authored book: “Jamaican Women and the World Wars: On the Front Lines of Change” was published in 2017. She has also written

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Shawna Kae Burns, Graduate Student, IGDS – RCO, The UWI. She is also a lecturer at The UWI, Mona Campus, and a social worker.

Dr. Bronty Liverpool-Williams is an Administrative Officer in the IGDS – RCO, The UWI. She has extensive experience in teaching at the secondary level and served as Deputy Headmistress of the St. Vincent Girls’ High School. She also has expertise in quality assurance in education having, served as Deputy Chief Inspector of the National Education Inspectorate in Jamaica. Her research interests include educational leadership, school inspection, and women in the Caribbean.

Kadine Marshall Williams, Senior Secretary, IGDS – RCO, The UWI. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Gender and Development Studies. holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Gender and Development Studies. She provides administrative support to the overall functions of the IGDS - RCO.

Dr. Adwoa Onuora is a lecturer in the IGDS – Mona Campus Unit. She has worked in formal and informal educational settings and has expertise in community situated-learning, equity and social change. She has taught and published on critical pedagogy and educational transformation, de- colonizing practices and indigenous epistemologies, the intersection and impact of gender, sexuality/sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, class, abilities, and culture on women’s lived experiences.

Dr. Maziki Thame is a Senior Lecturer in the IGDS - MCU. Her research focuses on the postcolonial Caribbean, the place of race, class, violence, radicalism, identity and gender in political life. Her work asks questions about how gender, race and class shape experiences of citizenship and how liberation is pursued in the Caribbean modern. Her most recent publications include: “Woman Out of Place: Portia Simpson-Miller and Middle Class Politics in Jamaica”, in Black Women in Politics: Demanding Citizenship, Challenging Power, and Seeking Justice, edited by Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, and “Racial Hierarchy and the Elevation of Brownness in Creole Nationalism”, in Small Axe 54. (Source: https://www.mona.uwi.edu/igds/maziki-thame)

Conference Co-Chair, Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley, Associate Professor in English, FIU

Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley is the Vice President of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars and Associate Professor of English, and affiliate faculty in African & African Diaspora Studies, Women's Studies and the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University.

Born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, Weir-Soley migrated to the at the age of 17. She received her diploma from Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, New York. While an undergraduate at the City University of New York at Hunter College, Weir-Soley was among the first cohort of students of color across the United States to win a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship in 1988. That

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Dr. Weir-Soley graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1990 and won the Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities to attend the , Berkeley. Dr. Weir-Soley graduated from U.C. Berkeley with an MA in English (special emphasis in Creative Writing) in 1993, and a PhD in English Literary Studies in 2000. She received a Mellon Travel and Research/Dissertation grant to conduct fieldwork for her dissertation on the relationship between African spirituality, Jamaican Nation language and Caribbean women’s writing in 2000. In 2004-2005, she was awarded the Mellon/ Career Enhancement Fellowship to complete her scholarly work, Eroticism Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings (University Press of Florida, 2009) which focuses on the nexus between spirituality and sexuality in African diasporic women’s writings.

Weir-Soley is a frequent invited speaker at the annual Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship Conference (recently renamed The Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Conference) where she mentors junior faculty and institute fellows on balancing work and life in academia. She is co-editor (with Opal Palmer Adisa) of the anthology Caribbean Erotic (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), and single author of two books of poetry: First Rain (full length, Peepal Tree Press, 2006) and The Woman Who Knew (chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2016).

In 2019, she was named coordinator of the Mellon funded Hispanic Serving Institutions Pathways to the Professoriate Fellowship at FIU. In 2020, she became the director of Mentoring and Professional Development for the Black Faculty Association at FIU. Weir-Soley is currently working on a creative nonfiction manuscript that explores the intersections of migration, mental illness, racism and classism in the USA and Jamaica.

Other Team Members

Dr. Alexandra Cornelius is the Director for the Center for Women and & Associate Teaching Professor of History and affiliate faculty in African & African Diaspora Studies, and Women's Studies at Florida International University.

Saniorah Lynn Edouard is currently a PhD student at City University New York - Graduate Center, pursuing her doctorate in Comparative Literature. Her work focuses on the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, as well as African American and African Diasporic literature.

Dr. Michaels Grafals is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Florida International University. He specializes in , Latinx literature, postcolonial theory and theories of subjectivity. He is interested in teaching writers who engage in diasporic and cross-cultural identities.

Anaridia R. Molina is a Ph.D. student in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She graduated with a B.A. in English Literature and certificates in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from Florida International University.

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CONFERENCE SPEAKERS Key Note Speaker - Patricia Powell, writer Friday, January 15, 2021 at 1:50 pm

Title: "Obeah, Spiritual Technologies and Social Justice"

Patricia Powell

Patricia Powell is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda, and The Fullness of Everything. A new novel, Balm Yard, is due out in 2022.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Powell emigrated to the US in 1982. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and the MFA Program at Brown University, and has taught at , MIT, Wellesley College, and is currently W.M Keck Foundation Professor of English at in Oakland, California.

Powell's work has been widely anthologized, taught in universities across North and South America, Europe and the Caribbean, and has been translated into German and Spanish (Lasiren Editora, Colombia). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a YWCA Tribute to Outstanding Women Award, and an Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Prize in Teaching and Scholarship.

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Gender and Social Justice Forum Saturday: January 16, 2021 at 9:00 am

Featuring: Carole Boyce Davies, writer Title: “Advancing New Leadership Paradigm for Caribbean Women”

Joan Andrea Hutchinson, Cultural Activist/Poet

Carole Boyce Davies, writer

Carole Boyce Davies

Carole Boyce-Davies is the H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Africana Studies and English at . She is the author of the prize-winning Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) on the internalization of Caribbean culture; and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English distributed as part of an educational project in Haiti by the Kellogg Foundation. In addition to over a hundred essays, articles published in major professional journals, Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published thirteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture such as the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (volume 1), Black Women's Diasporas (volume 2); the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia Jones Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). Her current research project is a contracted manuscript titled Alternative Presidents. Black Women and Political Leadership (2021). She is a past-president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016.

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Joan Andrea Hutchinson, cultural activist/poet

Joan Andrea Hutchinson

Joan Andrea Hutchinson is an internationally known poet, author, actress and storyteller, who has authored and self-published three books and produced seven CDs of original work, focusing on aspects of Jamaican culture. She is also a well-respected multi-faceted communications professional whose diverse skill set includes speech and advertising copywriting, designing communications campaigns, writing and editing books, and producing features for radio and television.

She is passionate about development work and in 2020 managed an upskilling and empowerment gender initiative for women exposed to gender-based violence. The Project also included the staging of a GBV Poetry and Essay Competition. She was facilitator for a one year empowerment programme for innercity youth offenders and has taught adult literacy through Operation Restoration in Trench Town and to pregnant teens and teen mothers at Mary’s Child, a home run by Missionaries for the Poor.

A graduate of the University of the West Indies, from which she earned a BA in Communication and post graduate Diplomas in Sociology and Mass Communication, Joan Andrea Hutchinson is a well- respected Public Speaking Coach, and has been a lecturer in Social Marketing for and radio and television at the University of the West Indies, and has taught Public Speaking and communications related courses at several universities.

As a behavior change communications consultant she conceptualized and executed several HIV anti- stigma and discrimination campaigns for the Ministry of Health including the landmark campaign which utilized for the first time, actual persons living with HIV/AIDS.

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An avid scholar and personal friend of the late Dr. Honourable Louise Bennett Coverley, Miss Lou, she conceptualized and produced her final major recording, the CD - Lawd Di Riddim Sweet.

Creative Writing Panel /Special Bonus Round Table: Saturday, January 16 at at 6:30 pm

Title: “Gender, Sexuality, and Mother Nature: A Conversation with Jamaican Literary- Activists”

Featuring:

Isis Semaj-Hall, PhD, (scholar) Lecturer Literatures in English, The UWI, Mona Campus The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

Diana McCaulay (writer and environmental activist)

Nicole Dennis-Benn (writer)

Isis Semaj-Hall, PhD, (scholar)

Isis Semaj-Hall, lecturer

(Source: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/entertainment/20180302/reckord-opal-palmer-adisa- multifaceted-writer-performer#slideshow-2)

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1. Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall is the Riddim Writer, a disruptive dub doctor with a creative practice that is nurtured by sound. She is a co-founder and editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing and has works published in Caribbean Quarterly, Cultural Dynamics, Jamaica Journal, and elsewhere. She is the Caribbean literature and pop culture specialist within the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Diana McCaulay, writer and environmental activist

Diana McCaulay

(Source: https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/diana-mccaulay)

Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican writer and environmental activist. She has written four earlier novels, including Dog-Heart (2010) and Huracan (2012), published by Peepal Tree Press. Both books met with critical acclaim and have broken local publishing records. (Her latest novel is Daylight Come, published 2020).

She has lived her entire life in Kingston, Jamaica and engaged in a range of occupations – secretary, insurance executive, racetrack steward, mid-life student, social commentator, environmental advocate. She is the founder and Board Chair of the Jamaica Environment Trust, and has received many awards for her environmental work, including the Ewan P McFarlane for Outstanding Environmental Leadership, a Bronze Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica and National Honours, the Order of Distinction (Officer Class).

Dog-Heart won a Gold Medal in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s National Creative Writing Awards (2008), was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize (2011), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2012) and the Saroyan Prize for International Writing (2012). Huracan was also shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize 2014. Her short fiction has been widely published and her story, ‘The Dolphin Catcher,’ won the Commonwealth Short Story Regional Prize in 2012. (Source: https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/diana-mccaulay)

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Nicole Dennis-Benn, writer Nicole Dennis-Benn

(Source: https://www.nicoledennisbenn.com/aboutNicole2.html)

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of HERE COMES THE SUN (Norton/Liveright, July 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award winner. Her bestselling sophomore novel, PATSY (Norton/Liveright, June 2019), is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner, a New York Times Editors' Choice, a Financial Times Critics Choice, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book, and a Today Show Read With Jenna Book Club selection. PATSY has been named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, TIME, NPR, PEOPLE Magazine, Washington Post, Apple Books, Oprah Magazine, The Guardian, Goodhousekeeping, BuzzFeed, ELLE, among others. "Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness," raves Time Magazine; and NPR names Dennis-Benn "an indispensable novelist".

In addition to being a two time Lambda Literary Award Winner for her novels PATSY and HERE COMES THE SUN, Dennis-Benn is a recipient of the National Foundation for the Arts Grant. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize; and has recently been long-listed for The Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and short-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Her work has appeared in , Elle, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, The Rumpus, Catapult, Red Rock Review, and Kweli Literary Journal, Mosaic, Ebony, and the Feminist Wire. She has previously taught in the writing programs at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, Sarah Lawrence College, and City College; and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, Lambda, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Hurston/Wright, and Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Dennis-Benn was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. She is a graduate of St. Andrew High School for Girls and Cornell University; and holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dennis-Benn is the founder of the Stuyvesant Writing Workshop and lives with her wife in Brooklyn, New York. (Source: https://www.nicoledennisbenn.com/aboutNicole2.html)

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