Editor-in-Chief
ANNIE PAUL is an India-born, Kingston-based writer and critic who was editor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) journal Social and Economic Studies till 2021 when she retired from the university. She was the 2023 Lakes writer-in-residence at Smith College (USA) where she taught a course called Writing, because. In 2020 she published a biography of Stuart Hall in UWI Press’s Caribbean Biography Series. Editor-in-chief of the new online magazine of writing PREE (preelit.com) and a founding editor of Small Axe she has been published in international journals and magazines such as Newsweek International, the Guardian (UK), Chimurenga, The Caravan (India), Slavery & Abolition, Art Journal, South Atlantic Quarterly, Wasafiri, Callaloo, and Bomb and a range of art books and catalogues such as the Brooklyn Museum’s Infinite Island and Documenta11’s Creolite and Creolization. Most recently Paul has published an edited selection from the first 5 issues of PREE, Bookmarked. She was on the board of the National Gallery of Jamaica and has published extensively on art. Paul is author of the blog Active Voice (anniepaul.net). You can follow her on Twitter @anniepaul and on Instagram @anniepaulish.
Managing Editor
SHANNON CHEN SEE is a poet, art writer, and marketer born and based in Kingston, Jamaica whose work explores Caribbean situatedness through questions of place, identity, and belonging. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Writing (Poetry) at Pacific University, and is a recipient of the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers, Washburn, and Merit scholarships. With her writing, she probes what it means to be unable to avoid something, for the body to be a false yet shifting signifier of otherness. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in sx salon, Burnaway, theVERSEverse, among others. Shannon regularly performs her poetry, and has been a featured poet for the University of the West Indies’ annual “Love Affair with Literature” event and the Poetry Society of Jamaica’s “New Year, New Voices” event. Connect with her at @watchensee on Instagram or https://watchensee.xyz.
PREE Production Crew
Born and raised in Nassau, The Bahamas, KIM WILLIAMS-PULFER, Ph.D., is a writer, independent scholar, educator, and the principal consultant of KWP Research Strategies LLC, a research consulting firm focused on community development, the arts, public humanities, and nonprofit and philanthropic management. Kim has worked as a researcher, educator, and community-based advisor for over fifteen years.
Kim has published her research and commentary in various academic journals, edited volumes, practitioner-based and popular forums on topics related to Caribbean philanthropy from below, memory making, community, and arts activism. She recently released her book, Get Involved: Stories of Bahamian Civil Society (Rutgers University Press, June 2024), and is a proud alumna of the PREE Writing Studio.
JESSICA KNIGHT is a writer, artist and Kundalini yoga practitioner based between Jamaica and England. She holds a degree in English Literature from Sussex University, an MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School, and a Level One Kundalini Teacher Training from Life Force Academy. At Sussex she expanded on her favourite course (Post-Colonial Literature) with history electives in the African American Civil Rights Movement and South Africa’s apartheid. At City & Guilds she applied dressmaking techniques to create textile sculptures. During the teacher training she became especially flexible – both physically and (more importantly) cognitively. Her interest in writing, art-making and yogic philosophy lies in contemplating man’s capacity for human and environmental exploitation. How do our attitudes to historic systems of exploitation differ from our attitudes to contemporary systems of exploitation? Answering this influences her writing and artmaking, but thankfully she takes regular breaks to meditate. Jessica worked for many years as a costume designer and maker for London theatres. She has been published with Pree, Skin Deep Magazine and Reggaeville. She is currently developing her next publications, the majority of which merge all her interests and concerns by stitching them into stories.
KERRY CHEN is a Creative Entrepreneur from Kingston, Jamaica, who has spent most of her life interacting with, researching, and documenting Jamaican culture. Professionally, she leverages artistic expression to disrupt and challenge conventional socio-cultural narratives. Since 2019, she has been using documentary filmmaking as a means of confronting and exposing the environmental violence and social injustice that is occurring in the Cockpit Country as a result of an expansion in government-sanctioned bauxite mining.
Recently, she has begun curating local art exhibitions as a means of interrogating ideas and inviting intelligent discourse around topics of social and cultural significance. The 2022 reggae month art exhibition, Vib(e)ration: Reggae in Art, which challenged traditional notions surrounding reggae expressions, was one such show. She also curates and co-produces a monthly film screening event, Films Under the Sky, which introduces viewers to alternative local, regional and international film content. Kerry also produces professional engagement events which connect emerging creatives with industry professionals.
SANDRA S. LICHTENBERG is an educator based in Berlin, Germany. She studied in Germany, Spain and England and holds a Master’s degree in Spanish philology, Law and North American studies. After living in Australia for two adventurous years she decided to go back to University and do a degree in education. Her time as secondary teacher set her back to her own school days and started reflecting on the kind of education she received in Germany; that’s when she veered off and began exploring more deeply her Jamaican roots through her mother’s accounts and family stories. Her new journey brought her back to University where she follows her own research interests. She focuses on questions about algorithmic media, discriminatory and racist practices embedded in these technologies, also on the coloniality of these media. Her further research interests comprise intersectionality, ideas about the subject and processes of subjectivation. Lately, she started centering her research on Caribbean thinkers. When Sandra manages to be away from the books she either follows the light with her analogue camera and captures moments of beauty or surprise, or is to be found in a swimming pool otherwise, on rare occasions only, on a surf board.
Associate Editors
NORVAL ‘NADI’ EDWARDS was a member of the Department of Literatures in English at The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica. He has published articles on Caribbean literature and criticism, travel writing, and popular culture. His research interests include Caribbean literary and cultural studies, and postcolonial literatures and theories.[Ed note: Nadi is excessively modest and this bio hardly begins to describe his accomplishments]
ISIS SEMAJ-HALL is a decolonial feminist, cultural analyst, and bad gyal Ph.D. Her curiosity is piqued at the intersection of art and politics.Shaped by her Jamaican childhood and New York adolescence, she has been known to write on sound studies and remix theory, Rihanna, Protoje, Edwidge Danticat, Marlon James, dub, and dancehall. Semaj-Hall is the author of the “write pon di riddim” blog and she lectures in Caribbean writing, reggae poetry, and popular culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona. See her on Instagram @riddim.writer or chat with her on Twitter @isissemajhall.
Editors
GARNETTE CADOGAN is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, he is an essayist who is especially drawn to write about cities, culture, and the arts.
Born in Manhattan and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, IVETTE ROMERO has always considered herself to be an islander. Her interest in exploring her family’s diverse Caribbean and trans-Atlantic roots, led her to reroute the path of her doctoral studies in French literature (at Cornell University) towards a comparative exploration of Caribbean literatures and cultures. She is professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Marist College, where she teaches Latin American literature, cultures, and cinema. Her research interests include Caribbean testimonial narrative, women’s studies, and visual arts. Her work has been published in journals such as Anales del Caribe, Callaloo, Mango Season, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and Sargasso. She has co-edited two volumes with Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures (2008). Currently, she is writing a book on aesthetic responses to AIDS in the Caribbean.
LENIQUECA WELCOME is a Trinbagonian PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). She is a member of the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) at UPenn—an interdisciplinary collective committed to participatory, experimental media-making. She is also a student affiliate of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at UPenn. Prior to starting her PhD program, she was trained as an architect at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and worked at ACLA architecture firm in Trinidad. As a designer and researcher, she is most broadly interested in issues related to securitization, racialization, space, visuality and sovereignty in the Caribbean. Her fieldwork is conducted in Trinidad in the area of East Port of Spain. Her research methods combine participant-observation, archival research, and portraiture photography and collaging.
LORETTA COLLINS KLOBAH’s first book The Twelve Foot Neon Woman (Peepal Tree Press, 2011) received the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in the category of poetry and was short-listed for the Felix Dennis Prize in the Forward Prize series. Her second book Ricantations (Peepal Tree Press, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a National Poetry Day selection. It was long-listed for the Bocas Prize. She has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Earl Lyons Award from The Academy of American Poets, and the Pam Wallace Award for an Aspiring Woman Writer. Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies. She lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she is a professor of Caribbean literature and creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.
She earned an M.F.A. in poetry writing from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she also completed a doctoral degree in English, with an emphasis on Caribbean literary and cultural studies. She was one of eight poets featured in the anthology New Caribbean Poetry, edited by Kei Miller (Carcanet Press, 2007), and her poetry has also been anthologized in the 1996 Pushcart Prize Anthology, TriQuarterly New Writers, and the collection How Much Earth? Her poetry and scholarly essays have been published widely in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, with poems appearing in such journals as The Caribbean Writer, Poui: The Cave Hill Literary Annual, TriQuarterly Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, The Missouri Review, The Antioch Review, Cimarron Review and Poet Lore. In addition to the Pushcart Prize and various awards from literary journals, her poetry has received the Earl Lyons Award from The Academy of American Poets and the Pam Wallace Award for an Aspiring Woman Writer. She was also the recipient of a tuition scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Loretta Collins Klobah’s poem “Tissue Gallery, ” was published in a November 2015 issue of The New Yorker, you can hear her reading the poem on the New Yorker website.
CHERIE JONES is a writer from Barbados. Her short fiction has been published in PANK, The Feminist Wire and Eclectica and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Cherie is a past fellowship awardee of the Vermont Studio Centre and honorary fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa. She received her MA in Writing (with distinction) from Sheffield Hallam University (UK) where she was awarded the Archie Markham Fellowship and the A. M. Heath Prize and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter. Her first novel ‘How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction (UK) and longlisted for the OCM BOCAS Prize for fiction (2022). Connect with Cherie on Facebook and IG @cheriejoneswrites.
SONI BROWN is a full-time freelance writer and tech journalist; her work has appeared in The New York Daily News, Associated Press, Nevada Independent, Las Vegas Review-Journal, The Believer, and more. She curates and teaches online creative writing workshops including the “Blended Genre Workshop” and the upcoming “Will Blog for Food” and “Writing Through Trauma.” She is working on a book about her repatriation to Jamaica from the US. Soni has an MFA in creative writing and lives in Montego Bay with her family and a polydactyl cat, Priscilla Purrsley.
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