P E E P A L T R E E P R E S S 2018 About Peepal Tree Press Peepal Tree Press is the world’s largest publisher of Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. Jeremy Poynting, recently awarded the Bocas Henry Swanzy Award for Distinguished Service to Caribbean Letters, is the founder and managing editor. Our team includes Hannah Bannister as operations manager, Kwame Dawes and Jacob Ross as, respectively, associate poetry and fiction editors, Kadija George and Dorothea Smartt as co-directors of the Inscribe programme, Adam Lowe as marketing and social media associate and Paulette Morris despatching orders and looking after our stock. Recent prize successes include the 2018 Casa de la Américas Literary Award for Anthony Kellman’s Tracing Ja Ja; the 2017 Clarissa Luard Award for innovation in publishing; and the 2017 Jhalak Prize for best book by a UK writer of colour, awarded to Jacob Ross for his literary crime novel The Bone Readers. Peepal Tree is a wholly independent company, founded in 1985, and now publishing around 20 books a year. We have published over 370 titles, and are committed to keeping most of them in print. The list features new writers and established voices. In 2009 we launched the Caribbean Modern Classics Series, which restores to print essential books from the past with new introductions. We are grateful for financial support from Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation since 2011; we were a regularly funded organisation from 2006. Arts Council funding allows us to sustain Inscribe, a writer development project that supports writers of African & Asian descent in England. In 2018 we will launch a regular podcast, The New Caribbean Voices. Join our mailing lists at http://www.peepaltreepress.com/subscribe to receive updates. Our focus is on what George Lamming calls the Caribbean nation, wherever it is in the world, though we are also concerned with Black British writing of different heritages. We publish fiction, poetry and a range of academic and non- fiction titles. We are based in Leeds in Yorkshire, part of an important independent publishing sector outside London, and are members of the Northern Fiction Alliance. Everything happens at 17 King’s Avenue, in the Burley area, a rundown, multicultural part of Leeds (where business rates are low and you can get a good massala fish across the road). Visit us at www.peepaltreepress.com to discover more, subscribe to our mailing lists and newsletters http://www.peepaltreepress.com/subscribe and check out our blogs http://www.peepaltreepress.com/blogs What’s In a Name? In the nineteenth century over two million Indians were lured away to work as indentured labourers on the sugar estates of the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji and other parts of the Empire. They brought the peepal tree with them and planted it in these new environments, a sign of their comitment to their cultural roots. Peepal Tree Press focuses on bringing readers the very best of international writing from the Caribbean, its diasporas and the UK., and our books express the popular resources of transplanted and transforming cultures. Founded in 1985, Peepal Tree has published over 400 books and has grown to become the world’s leading publisher of Caribbean and Black British Writing. Our goal is to publish books that make a difference, and though we always want to achieve the best possible sales, we’re most concerned with whether a book will still be alive and have value in the future. Visit us at www.peepaltreepress.com to discover more. Peepal Tree Press 17 Kings Avenue, Leeds LS6 1QS, United Kingdom +44 (0)1 1 3 2451703 contact @ peepaltreepress.com www.peepaltreepress.com Trade Distribution – see back cover Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems Pedro Mir A bilingual edition, translated by Jonathan Cohen & Donald D. Walsh “Pure genius.” Junot Díaz New York Times Pedro Mir’s “Countersong to Walt Whitman” is an homage to the liberatory spirit of the great American poet, but one which critiques the way Whitman’s hymn to the self not only left out Native American and Black experience, but had been corrupted by capitalism and was now (the poem was first published in 1952) represented by the violent activities of American imperialism and its local dictator clients in the Caribbean. But whilst a poem such as “Amen to Butterflies” laments the brutal assassination of the Mirabel sisters by agents of Trujillo, the U.S. supported dictator of the Dominican Republic, Mir’s poetry retains a powerful sense of hope in the collective resilience of the Caribbean people’s struggle for racial, social and economic justice. In what is currently the only book-length collection in English and Spanish, the expert ISBN: 9781845233563 and sensitive translations of Jonathan Cohen and the late Donald A. Walsh brings Pedro 172 pages £12.99 /USD$18.95 Mir into the company of Pablo Neruda, Kamau Brathwaite, Nicolás Guillén and Aimé POETRY, TRNSLATION, Césaire as great radical voices of the region. Other poems translated include: “There Is a CARIBBEAN MODERN CLASSICS PRINT Country in the World”; “If Somebody Wants to Know Which Is My Country”; “To the January 2018 Battleship Intrepid”; “Not One Step Back”; “Amen to Butterflies”; “Concerto of Hope for Rights held: World the Left Hand”; “Meditation on the Shores of Evening.” The introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant, and foreword by Jean Franco, enable a broader appreciation of the personal context and general impact of Mir’s work. A selected bibliography of works by and about the poet, including the prose he has published as a novelist, author of short stories, essayist, and historian, provides readers with ample resources for further study. Pedro Mir (1913–2000) is recognized as the Dominican Republic’s foremost literary figure of the Photo: Joseph Schneberg twentieth century. 4 The Fiction of Garth St Omer: A Casebook edited by Antonia MacDonald With the republication of Garth St Omer’s novels, around fifty years after their original appearance, a new generation of readers has been discovering how modern a writer he is, whilst others have been remembering just how good the novels are. These qualities are documented in this casebook that brings together reviews from the time of first publication, later critical surveys, personal memories and contemporary re-assessments of St Omer’s small but important body of work. Edited with an introductory survey by Antonia MacDonald, essays discuss both individual novels (including St Omer’s never previously published novel Prisnms) and the themes that run through his work, including the significance of masks and masking, his sensitivity to issue of gender inequalities, his exactness in recording the complex nature of the interplay between race, class and culture, and his resolute honesty in acknowledging the real difficulty of moving from colonial to independent mentalities and the relationship ISBN: 9781845233570 of his deeply humanist writing to existentialist philosophy. The Casebook includes 170 pages £16.99 / USD$22.95 reviews from: E.K. Brathwaite, Cliff Lashley, John Wickham, Kenneth Ramchand, John LITERARY CRITICISM Hemming, Maurice Capitanchick; previously published surveys by Edward Baugh, John PRINT February 2018 Robert Lee, Pat Ismond, Jacqueline Cousins and Gordon Rohlehr; personal responses Rights held: World by Velma Pollard and Jane King; and new critical essays by Edward Baugh, Milt Moise, Mallica Willie, Antonia MacDonald and Jeremy Poynting. Antonia MacDonald was born and grew up in St. Lucia. She now lives in Grenada where she is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Dean in the School of Graduate Studies. Professor MacDonald writes on contemporary Caribbean women writers and, more recently, Derek Walcott and on St. Lucian Literary Studies. She has published articles in the Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), Anthurium, Callaloo and MaComere and is the author of Making Homes in the West/ Indies. 5 City of Bones Kwame Dawes “Extending Kwame Dawes’s already wide-ranging and prolific body of work,City of Bones is a testament to a complicated past that replays itself in the daily lives of so many Americans today. In the shadow of the Thirteenth Amendment Dawes remixes the works of August Wilson and brings lucidity to our present moment. Unafraid to trouble the waters and make clear why American race relations exist as they currently do, City of Bones sets the record straight and leaves no doubt that the past is ever present and we have not yet overcome. City of Bones should leave no question in the minds of any contemporary reader that Kwame Dawes is one of the most significant poets working today. This is poetry’s ‘Redemption Song.’” —Matthew Shenoda, author of Tahrir Suite “City of Bones stands beside the light found in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. It is an urgent work ISBN: 9781845234164 of poetry that begets civic empathy, indictment and clarity; one that stands in, but will travel 232 pages £12.99 (Not for sale in the USA) well beyond, its own time. This is a major new book by a major poet.” — Rebecca Gayle POETRY Howell, author of Render: An Apocalypse PRINT February 2018 Rights held: UK and Caribbean Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty books, and is widely recognized as one of the Caribbean’s leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. In 2018 he was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is Peepal Tree’s associate poetry editor. 6 Creole Chips and Other Writings Edgar Mittelholzer, edited by Juanita Cox This compendium of Edgar Mittelholzer’s mostly uncollected writings, brings together his early collection of sketches of Georgetown life, Creole Chips, his speculative anti- capitalist novella, The Adding Machine, twenty-four short stories, five plays, his published and unpublished poetry and essays covering travel, literature and his personal beliefs.