KINGSTON, Jamaica – The U.S. Embassy continues its tradition of support for literary development in Jamaica, and is once again a sponsor of the Calabash International Literary Festival, being held this weekend (May 24-25) in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth.
The Calabash Foundation has been given a grant to support the visit of five American authors: Cornelius Eady, Aracelis Girmay, Gregory Pardlo, Nina Revoyr and Natasha Trethewey. This is the sixth consecutive year that the embassy has sponsored artists to attend the festival.
The U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Officer Patricia Attkisson, in making the presentation to Calabash Producer Justine Henzell noted, “The Public Affairs Section of the U.S. Embassy is pleased to continue its six-year association with Calabash. Its organizers, especially Justine Henzell, have demonstrated that they have a deep understanding of the Caribbean experience, and by extension, of Caribbean literature. They also have a great nose for talent, bringing to a beautiful little nook of Jamaica an eclectic combination of Nobel Prize winners, established authors, the up-and-coming, as well as enthusiastic “doodlers.” There is no other event like Calabash in the world, and for this reason, the embassy is happy to encourage its existence.”
Cornelius Eady is the author of six books of poetry. They include Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Eady is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. He is currently an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Aracelis Girmay is the author of Teeth, a collection of poems published by Curbstone Press. Her poems have also been published in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Callaloo, & MiPOesias, among other journals. Her collage-based picture book was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay teaches writing workshops in New York and California. She is the 2008–2009 visiting writer at Queens College.
Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, won the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Gulf Coast, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Volt, Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noir, and on National Public Radio. He is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received other fellowships from the New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, and Cave Canem.
Nina Revoyr’s most recent novel is The Age of Dreaming; she is also author of the novels The Necessary Hunger and Southland. Southland was a Book Sense 76 pick. It also won a Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award in addition to being named one of the Best Books of 2003 by the Los Angeles Times.
Natasha Trethewey is the author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007. Her other collections are Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf), a Notable Book selection of the American Library Association in 2003, and Domestic Work which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet in 2000. Domestic Work was also the winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize in 2001 and the Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.
