Grand Dame Of Caribbean Literature to read at The Florida Center For The Literary Arts At Miami Dade College

MIAMI – The Florida Center for the Literary Arts (FCLA) at Miami Dade College (MDC) will host one of the Caribbean’s most preeminent writers, Maryse Condé, Thursday, April 6th at 7 p.m. at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, located on 101 West Flagler Street, in downtown Miami.

Her appearance will be preceded by live Caribbean music at 6 p.m. This reading is free and open to the public. A second reading will take place on Saturday, April 8th, at 2 p.m. at the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center, 2650 Sistrunk Blvd. in Ft Lauderdale.

Ms. Condé’s reading at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida is presented in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibit Caribbean Collage: Archival Collections and the Construction of History. Caribbean Collage focuses on the history of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the English-speaking Caribbean from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

This was a period of massive social change: slavery ended, new forms of plantation and small-scale agriculture developed, and independent nation-states with distinct creole cultures emerged.

The exhibition will explore this large-scale transformation. This exhibit is presented in collaboration with the Department of Special and Area Studies Collections of the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Libraries.

While in residence at Miami Dade College, Condé will work with students in Professor Ana Hernandez’ class, The Immigrant’s Voice in Literature.

“The Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College is proud to showcase this prolific writer who speaks so eloquently on the topic of exile, broken families, and race matters,” said Alina Interián, FCLA executive director. “Her voice will warrant a warm welcome in our community, where such matters are very much top of mind.”

The Guadeloupe-born author has written twelve novels, including I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem; Windward Heights; Crossing the Mangrove; and Desirada.

An award-winning writer, Condé has been a professor at Columbia and Harvard universities, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Virginia. She now teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York and Guadeloupe with her husband and translator, Richard Philcox.