You could feel the love in the room on Saturday, October 13, 2007, when over fifty South Florida writers turned out at the Miami Beach Regional Library to honor Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books. It was truly heartfelt.

I've decided to run a survey based on this quote by VS Naipaul in "Caribbean Odyssey":

I write for the same reason I breathe—because I have to.

Well, Mad Bull, Georgia, and Leon I've finished it! And although my agent, Janell Agyeman, who has just returned from the book expo in New York, says that many of the publishers are still lukewarm--they say it's a novel about non-US people about a subject few know anything about--she's going to try anyway because Virtual Yardies is the first of it's kind in fiction--tell me if I'm wrong, blogosphere!

In commemoration of Caribbean-American Heritage Month 2007, award winning author, Geoffrey Philp, will be launching his recently published children's book, Grandpa Sydney's Anancy Stories, on June 30, 2007. The reading which begins at 10: 30 am will be held at Kara's Jamaican & Chinese Restaurant, 8120 Pines Blvd, Hollywood, FL 33024.

According to Greek mythology, the Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, which is another way of saying that our relationship with the infinite is conditioned by memory and that poetry and history are forms of memory. And memory, despite the objectivists is never neutral. For example, how should the years of slavery and British colonialism be remembered? As a long nightmare of dehumanizing shame or as Derek Walcott has said, "I feel no shame in having endured the colonial experience…It was cruel, but it created our literature" ("Meanings" 50)? In Dennis Scott's aptly named "Epitaph," the speaker examines the difficulty of writing about historical events by using the language of composition to describe the physical and emotional effects of slavery.

And there is always her playful humor. For even when she's vamping on the D(ead) W(hite) M(en) of the canon, "A thing of beauty is a boy forever," her sense of the fantastic hovers over every line so that the real becomes woven into dream, into fairy tale, myth, and re-enters the body as poetry that is grounded in the body, "an ear lobe, toe, small tender ankle" ("Making Love to a Cannibal").

Reading John’s “Cayuna” novels provides us insight into the story of Jamaica as it moved from colonialism into independence. The device of creating a fictional version of Jamaica (as Mervyn Morris says, “Cayuna is Jamaica right down to Green Stripe beer”), permitted him to explore change both in Jamaican society (the bauxite industry, the Rastafari movement), and in relation to neighbouring countries (events in Haiti, the Cuban Revolution) in a mode that allied both distance and closeness. The accents of Cayuna and the places are as Jamaican as it is possible to be, and yet separated from the real Jamaica by an infinite distance.

Since we value money so much, any leader who talks about cultural development should immediately adopt this proposal: 1. Regional prizes of $50, 000 (TT dollars) each for the best novel, best book of poetry, choreography, etc). This money can be raised by a combination of public and private contributions following models that have been developed in the UK and US. 2. Contract negotiations for any textbook adoption for CXC exams or at any grade level by any Ministry of Education must be tied to promote the publication of living writers. The contracts with the publishers would be on a sliding scale depending on the size of the business. Small publishers could publish one or two titles per year while large publishers could publish ten or fifteen titles per year. The governments wouldn’t have to spend a penny because they are providing the market—the impressionable minds of our children. It’s that simple.

On the night of August 6, 1962 when the Union Jack was lowered and the Jamaican flag was raised, many people woke up the next morning looking at the auction blocks of the slave trade from slightly different perspectives. Not all whites were on the European side, and not all blacks were on the African side. And within the region, the status of so-called “brown” people, who were always held suspect by both sides, brought to the fore the idea of “hybridity.”