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FREDERIKSTED — The 4th Annual Virgin Islands Literary Festival and Book Fair is scheduled for April 13 and 14, 2018 on the Albert A. Sheen Campus of the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) on St. Croix.
The program will be chaired, for the third year in succession, by Alscess Lewis-Brown, UVI adjunct Professor and Editor of the Caribbean Writer. The Literary Festival and Book Fair is billed as a benefit event with an abbreviated itinerary.
“We are aiming to make this abbreviated version of our treasured festival an unforgettable event,” Brown said. “Our central theme, “Rough Tides, Tough Times: Reflections and Transitions” is both a gesture to and capitalizing on our all-around tumultuous transition into 2018.”
“As in the past, the festival is a toast to ideas and a celebration of the imagination through literature, panel discussions and workshops on writing, publishing and film production. This year, there will be a special emphasis on film production.”
While the main events will be held at UVI, there will also be several other venues including the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts on the waterfront in Frederiksted, Balter’s St. Croix Restaurant in Christiansted and, for the first time, UVI’s St. Thomas Campus where the keynote speaker, author and Professor of Philosophy Lewis Gordon, will address an audience of bibliophiles and literature lovers in the Administration and Conference Center at 10 a.m. on Friday, April 13.
The Festival will feature:
Dr. Lewis Gordon, keynote speaker, also Honorary President and Core Professor at the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa and a musician who regularly performs in blues, jazz, reggae, and rock bands.
Paget Henry, author and professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University, will present on “Properly Documenting Sources and Building Credibility.” Henry is editor of The C.L.R. James Journal and co-editor of the Routledge series Africana Thought.
Jamaica Kincaid will be conducting a workshop on writing memoirs. Kincaid is an award-winning Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She resides in Vermont and teaches at Harvard University as the Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence.
Sharon Lewis is a director, showrunner, actor, and writer. Her latest production is titled Brown Girl Begins, an afro-futurist feature film about a young black woman who is trapped in a world forced upon her. She will host interactive workshops on Film Production.
Summer Edward is a Children’s Literature Consultant and Childhood Literacy Specialist and will host a workshop on writing for children. Her work has been anthologized in New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, OBE and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean edited by Mythopoeic Award winning author Karen Lord.
Robert W. White is a St. Croix architect and the author of “The Trip, All The Way In My Chevrolet” and the soon-to-be-released historical novel about Alexander Hamilton’s mother titled “Rachel’s Whispers.” White will be appearing at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts on the waterfront in Frederiksted on Friday.
Tiphanie Yanique, a Virgin Islands-born author who has garnered wide acclaim for her new novel, “Land of Love and Drowning”. She is a member of The Caribbean Writer’s editorial advisory board. Yanique is a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University.
Tobias Buckell’s work has been dubbed “violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s Science Fiction. Along with other stand-alone novels and his over 50 stories, his works have been translated into 18 different languages. For the last two festivals, Buckell has lent his flavor and nurture to the annual Student Writers’ Competition, which itself has birthed a number of first-time published authors. Born in the Caribbean, Buckell grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, the islands that have influenced much of his writing.