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 is 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.

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. 

VLADIMIR LUCIEN is a writer, actor and critic from St. Lucia. His writing has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, Small Axe journal, the PN Review, BIM magazine, Caribbean Beat, VOGUE, the Washington Square Review and other journals. He was awarded the first prize in the poetry category of the Small Axe prize 2013 and is the winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Literature for his debut collection Sounding Ground, published by Peepal Tree Press in May, 2014. Some of Lucien’s poems have been translated into Dutch, Italian and Mandarin. He is also co-editor of the anthology, Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of St. Lucia which was published in November 2014 and the screenwriter of the documentary The Merikins which premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2013.   

NAOMI JACKSON is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. She was a 2021-2022 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and served as Writer-in-Residence at Queens College. She previously taught at the University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York, and Oberlin College. Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. 

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. 

NNEKA JACKSON (she/her) is a multidisciplinary writer, curator, and attorney whose work nurtures and amplifies Afro-diasporic stories across her practices. She has been published across several different platforms including Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, gal-dem and NIKE ACG. Based in Kingston, Jamaica, her writing and creative themes include fiction, poetry, joy and liberation.

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.

NATALIE REINHART is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York. Her research questions the enduring legal histories of Jamaica from the periods of slavery and Apprenticeship to the present, including the social structures of voice, testimony, and embodiment for young women. Her work asks how agency may be determined through archival and legal documentation, and how race, gender, and vulnerability are fashioned inside of the courtroom and through the category of girlhood. 

SOCIAL MEDIA

JDA GAYLE, our social media manager, is a critic who writes from the margins of queerness and Jamaicanness about the mundane and sublime narratives we use to define ourselves. She holds a master’s degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University, and is currently at work on a nonfiction book.

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Archive

The Team. Issue 1. Crossroads. Below was the setup we started with. The current editorial configuration is as shown above.

Publisher

SHARMAINE LOVEGROVE is the Publisher of Dialogue Books the UK’s only inclusive imprint, part of Little, Brown Book Group and Hachette UK. Prior to going in-house Sharmaine was the Co-Founder and Publishing Director of Dialogue Scouting, the UK’s first book to film & TV scouting consultancy as well as being Literary Editor at ELLE magazine. Her path is drawn from all things innovative in storytelling and in 2008 Sharmaine set up her own bookshop as well as a creative agency in Berlin having worked previously in PR, bookselling, event management and digital consultancy and magazine publishing. Home is London and her roots are Jamaican and stories make her part of the world.  You can follow her on twitter @sharlovegrove

Editor-in-Chief

ANNIE PAUL is a writer and critic based at the University of the West Indies, Mona, where she is head of the Publications Section at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies. Author of a weekly column in the Jamaica Gleaner and Editor of the book Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite Paul is the recipient of a grant from the Prince Claus Fund (Netherlands). Paul serves on the board of the National Gallery of Jamaica. She is a founding editor of the journal Small Axe and the original Caribbean Review of Books; and 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. Paul was born in India and is author of the blog Active Voice (anniepaul.net). You can follow her on Twitter @anniepaul.

Editors

DIANA McCAULAY is a Jamaican writer and environmental activist. She has written four novels, Dog-Heart, Huracan, Gone to Drift and White Liver Gal. Dog-Heart was shortlisted for the Guyana Prize; both Dog-Heart and Huracan were shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize for International Writing and both Dog-Heart and Gone to Drift were longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award. Gone to Drift placed second in the Burt Prize for Caribbean Literature, won the Lignum Vitae Vic Reid Award in 2015. McCaulay also won the Hollick Arvon Prize for Caribbean writing in 2014, for her non-fiction work-in-progress Loving Jamaica: a memoir of place and (not) belonging. Her short fiction has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Granta On Line, Fleeting Magazine, The Caribbean Writer, Afro-Beat and Lifestyle Magazine. She was the regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2012, for her short story The Dolphin Catchers. You can follow her on Twitter @dmccaulay.

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.

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.

Creative Director

NERYS HUDSON mainly reads, but sometimes writes and designs as well. Generally, she is happiest when working with stories.