Best known as the lead singer of the seminal reggae band Chalice, Wayne Armond began his music career in the 1970s during his high school years as a member of the Hell’s Angels. During this time he supported a number of leading Jamaican artists in performance, among them the Wailers, Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson, Derrick Harriott and Marcia Griffiths. In 1978, he joined Byron Lee and the Dragonaires as guitarist, forming Chalice two years later in 1980. With Chalice, he wrote and recorded a number of hits including “I Still Love You,” “Good To Be There,” “Dangerous Disturbances,” “Can’t Dub,” and “Revival Time.”

After Chalice, Mr. Armond toured the world for six years as a guitarist with reggae icon Jimmy Cliff. He has also toured as a guitarist with jazz legend Monty Alexander. Mr. Armond’s list of studio collaborations includes sessions with Alpha Blondy, Maxi Priest and Manu Dibango. Currently a member of the duet Warm & Easy, Mr. Armond has written songs that have been recorded by some of reggae’s most important artistes, among them, Rita Marley, Culture, J.C. Lodge and the late Dennis Brown.

Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City since the age of 13, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor has been writing poetry since her son Malik was born. As a young child growing up in Trinidad, her mother read and recited poetry to her at bedtime. A seed was planted, and in 1994 Boyce-Taylor became the first Caribbean woman to present her work in Trinidadian dialect at the National Poetry Slam in Asheville, North Carolina. Along with her New York City team, she won third place.

Boyce-Taylor holds Master's degrees in Education and Social work. She is currently teaching a summer course at Long Island University on the poetry of the Caribbean and African-American women poets. In addition, she teaches poetry to fifth and sixth graders at two elementary schools in Long Island City. Her most recent book is Convincing The Body.

Born and raised on the nature island of the Caribbean, Dominica, Anita left her island home some eighteen years ago to join her husband Alwin here in Jamaica. This small island woman has not only given the theatre arts of the Caribbean her special managerial skills but has also brought her entrepreneurial energy to the cultural industries of the region.

Anita currently teaches part time at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. She is the coordinator of a special project for the Jamaican chapter of Women in Film and Television, and still finds time to provide assistance to her island home in the area of entertainment and cultural tourism.

Emily Crooks is a broadcast journalist. She is the co-host of the Power 106 program Nationwide, a news and current affairs show that covers both local and international issues. She’s also the host of the CVM-TV news program IMPACT. A linguist by training and a journalist by profession, Ms. Crooks is currently pursuing a law degree at the University of London.

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in a recent interview his “spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. His eleventh collection of verse, Wisteria: Poems From the Swamp Country was published in January of this year by Red Hen Press. His memoir, A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative also appeared this year from Peepal Tree Press. Excerpts of it were published in Granta and World Literature Today. 

He is the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina, where he Directs the University of South Carolina Arts Institute as well as the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He has been for six years the Programming Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica each year.

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958. He was educated at the local grammar school and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read English. He is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search and The Colour of Memory. He is also the author of Ways of Telling, a critical study of John Berger, and the essay collection Anglo-English Attitude in addition to four genre-defying titles.

They are But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage and Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It. But Beautiful was winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize and short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize). Out of Sheer Rage was a finalist, in the U.S., for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It was the winner of the 2004 WH Smith Best Travel Book Award. Mr. Dyer’s most recent book is The Ongoing Moment, winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays, and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003, he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and in 2005 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Sandra Cisneros says, “Martín Espada is the Pablo Neruda of North American authors.” Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published thirteen books in all as a poet, editor and translator. His eighth book of poems is called The Republic of Poetry, forthcoming from W.W. Norton. His last collection, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002), which was also published by Norton, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the year. An earlier collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He has received numerous awards, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Charity Randall Citation, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and two NEA Fellowships. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda. He has been recently notified that he is a 2006 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Diana Evans was born in London, where she still lives today. She majored in media studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton and worked as a dancer before beginning her writing career. She was the arts and music editor for Pride Magazine and then branched out into freelance journalism. She has written features, reviews and interviews for Marie Claire, The Independent, The Evening Standard, The Source, Dance Theatre Journal, The Stage, NME.com, and more recently, The Observer and The Daily Telegraph. Her short fiction has been published in anthologies such as IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain and Kin, an anthology of black and Asian women writers.

In 2003 she obtained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she completed her first novel, 26a, winner of the inaugural Orange Award for New Writers. 26a was also long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, and short-listed for both the Whitbread First Novel and Commonwealth Best First Book awards.

Cathleen Falsani is the religion writer for the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, where she has covered her diverse “God beat” from locations as far afield as Vatican City, Ireland, Germany, the Caribbean, the West Wing of the White House, the Playboy Mansion and the dugout at Wrigley Field. She writes a weekly syndicated column on spirituality and popular culture, and her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone and Christianity Today magazines, and the Chicago Tribune newspaper. 

She is a graduate of Wheaton College, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham, U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and horror film director Wes Craven. (Admittedly, she finds more common ground with Craven than Hastert.) Cathleen holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University as well as a master’s degree in theological studies from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. A native of New England, she lives in the Chicago area with her husband and fellow journalist, Maurice Possley. The God Factor, which was released to critical acclaim in March, is her first book.

Christopher John Farley was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in Brockport, New York. He is a 1988 graduate of Harvard University and a former editor of The Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Lampoon. He has worked as a reporter for USA Today and as a music critic, writer and editor for Time magazine. He is currently an editor on the staff of The Wall Street Journal.

His biography of Bob Marley entitled Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley, will be published by Amistad/HarperCollins in May of 2006. His previous books include the novels Kingston By Starlight, a retelling of the true story of Anne Bonny, My Favorite War, a satirical look at the first Gulf War,   and the bestselling biography Aliyah: More Than A Woman. Mr. Farley is also co-author of Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which served as the companion volume to the acclaimed PBS series of the same name.

Steve Golding toured the world as the rhythm guitarist for Peter Tosh between 1981 and 1983. During that time he also worked on albums for Judy Mowatt and Rita Marley of the I Threes. His professional music career began in the late 1960s when he joined the Rhythms, which paved his way for membership in the Fabulous Five in 1970. He remained with this popular Jamaican group until 1975. During this time, Mr. Golding also played guitar and percussions for the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica (NDTC).

Many people remember Mr. Golding from his ten-year stint as a performer on Jamaica’s north coast with his childhood friend Ossie D. A founding member of the Jamaica Association of Composers, Artists and Performers (JACAP). Mr. Golding is involved in music in various aspects, including performance and teaching.

Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has received much recognition and many awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region) and Jamaica’s Musgrave Gold Medal. She has published two collections of short stories: Baby Mother and the King of Swords (Longman,1990; now in its third printing) and Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2005). Her books of poetry include Tamarind Season, I Am Becoming My Mother, Heartease and Controlling the Silver. From Harvey River, a memoir, will be published by McClelland and Stewart in 2006.

She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, and teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for African and African-American Studies at the University of Michigan.

Suheir Hammad is the author of Born Palestinian, Born Black, Drops of This Story, and her latest, Zaatar Diva. An original writer and performer for the Tony Award winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir has read her work throughout the world, and is very happy to be in Jamaica for the first time. For more information visit www.SuheirHammad.com

Sally Henzell was born in Mandeville, Jamaica in l941. She was educated at Hampton School in Malvern. She started writing in her teens. Her stories and essays have been published in The Jamaica Daily Gleaner, The West India Review and Skywritings. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies Jamaica Woman and Focus as well as in the Evergreen Review. In 2004, she published a small volume of verse called Paper Images. Her favorite writers include Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolfe and Ranier Maria Rilke.

A Detroit native, Lolita Hernandez’s writing is greatly influenced by the rhythms and language of her Trinidad and St. Vincent family, and is tempered by over thirty years as a UAW worker, twenty-one of them at the Cadillac Plant in Detroit. Her first book of fiction is Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant (Coffee House Press, 2004), winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. Some of the stories in the collection first appeared in The Iowa Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and Seeds: The Biannual Journal of Sisters of Color. She lives in Detroit.

Marlon James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. He graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1991 with a degree in Language and Literature and worked in graphic design, advertising and print production until 2005, when Akashic Books published his first novel John Crow’s Devil, which was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize — First Book category for the Canada/Caribbean region, and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction.

He’s a Calabash Writer’s Workshop Fellow and a recent recipient of a Norris Church Mailer Scholarship. He is completing a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

Margo Jefferson is a cultural critic for The New York Times. She has been a daily book reviewer, the Sunday theater critic and a Sunday Book Review columnist. She received a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995.

Her book, On Michael Jackson, was published by Pantheon in 2006. In 2002 she was a Senior Fellow in Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program and in 2001 an Artist-in-Residence at Anna Deveare Smith’s Institute for The Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. She has also written and performed two theater pieces at The Cherry Lane Theater (2001) and The Culture Project (2002).

Ms. Jefferson has been a staff reviewer for Newsweek and a Contributing Editor to Vogue. Essays for Grand Street and The Nation received awards from The Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines and The American Library Association. She teaches at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College.

Zakes Mda (full names: Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda) is a South African writer, painter, composer and filmmaker. He commutes between South Africa and the United States of America, working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, a dramaturge at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, and a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.

His novels include She Plays With the Darkness (1995), Ways of Dying (1997), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Whale Caller (2005). His numerous honors include a 2005 Notable Books Award from the American Library Association, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Africa Region and a Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award.

Anthony “Billy Mystic” Wilmot is a singer, songwriter and actor. He’s perhaps best known as the lead singer and rhythm guitarist of The Mystic Revealers, which released the albums Young Revolutionaries, Jah Works, Space and Time, This One’s For Jah, Crossing the Atlantic and Ras Portraits.

He’s played the character CC on the CVM-TV soap opera Royal Palm Estate for the last eleven seasons and is the founder and president of the Jamaica Surfing Association. 

Elizabeth Nunez was born in Trinidad and lives in New York. She is the author of six novels: Prospero’s Daughter; Grace; Discretion; Bruised Hibiscus; Beyond the Limbo Silence; and When Rocks Dance. She is also co-editor of the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad. A former fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, cofounder of the National Black Writers Conference and director from 1986-2000, Elizabeth Nunez currently chairs the PEN American Center’s Open Book program.

She is executive producer of the CUNY TV series Black Writers in America, which was nominated for a 2004 NY Emmy Award and aired on PBS stations across the U.S. Her honors include an American Book Award for Bruised Hibiscus, and the Independent Publishers Award in the multicultural fiction category for Beyond the Limbo Silence. Her novel Discretion was short-listed for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her most recent novel, Prospero’s Daughter, is a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection.

For more information, visit www.elizabethnunez.com.

Program: Aspects of the Novel

Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman who is the Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. She has been published in over thirty anthologies, including The Best American Poetry of 2003 and Century of the Tiger: One Hundred Years of Korean Culture in America. Her first book, entitled The Temperature of This Water, is a winner of a 2005 PEN America Beyond Margins Award and is the 2005 Members’ Choice of the Asian American Literary Awards. She was a touring cast member of the Tony Award winning production Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam and is a regular on the related HBO series.

The New York Times said of her, "Ms. Park has an angelic face and the soul of a rock star." With her unique blend of storytelling, poetry, prose, and song, Ishle has been a featured performer at over three hundred venues and festivals in the United States, Cuba, Korea, Singapore, and New Zealand. She has received grants from PEN America, The New York Foundation of the Arts, The San Francisco Arts Council, and The Korea Times.

For more info visit www.ishle.com.

Sonia Sanchez is the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medalist for 2001. She is the author of over sixteen books, including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under A Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, Like the Singing Coming off the Drums and most recently Shake Loose my Skin.

Among Ms. Sanchez’s honors are a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucretia Mott Award for 1984, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for 1992-1993 and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999. Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998.

This is Seretse Small’s 20th year as a professional musician. His training began at the Jamaica School of Music then continued at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He made his name as a jazz guitarist and has performed at major jazz festivals in Grenada, Jamaica and St Lucia. He’s also appeared as a featured artiste on the TV channel BET on Jazz.

Seretse spent the past three years on a world tour with Grammy-winning artiste Sean Paul. Since then he’s returned to Jamaica to focus on running his own music publishing company, Griot Music, which was recently selected as the National Coordinator for the Global Battle of the Bands. He’s also formed his own band, Sereste and the True Democrats, which is in the process of recording its first album

Program: Blackheart Man

Dancehall deejay Tanya Stephens’ most recent CD is Gangsta Blues (VP Records). Her recording career began in 1993 with the release of the single “Is This for Real.” Her first hit came a year later in 1994 with the single “Big Tings a Gwaan.” Other hits since then include “Goggle,” “Yuh Nuh Ready,” and “It’s A Pity”.

Considered by many to be one of the most literary writers in the history of the deejay profession, she says that she “hates being categorized as a female [in the music business] because my work has nothing to do with gender. Don't say I'm one of the best female lyricists in Jamaica. You’re not really complimenting me at all. There're so few females [in the business] and even less who actually write their own stuff!"

M.G. Vassanji was born in Nairobi and brought up in Dar es Salaam. He went to university in the United States, where he studied nuclear physics, after which he went to Canada. He is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Gunny Sack, winner of the Commonwealth Prize for first work of fiction, Africa region, The Book of Secrets, winner of the 1993 Giller Prize for best novel in Canada, and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, winner of the 2003 Giller Prize. All three works are set in East Africa.

His novel No New Land examines the lives of new immigrants to Canada, and Amriika is an exploration of dissidence and student life in the United States. He has also written two collections of short stories — Uhuru Street, set in Dar es Salaam, and When She Was Queen. His work has been published in many countries and he is contemplating co-translating his short stories into Kiswahili.

He’s also appeared in such feature films as Domino, Wondrous Oblivion, The Core, The Last Castle, Gone in 60 Seconds (opposite Nicolas Cage and Robert Duvall), Ransom (for which he received an NAACP Image Award nomination for his role opposite Mel Gibson) and Get Shorty, again opposite Hackman and DeVito. On TV, Lindo will next be seen in Kidnapped, which will begin airing in Fall 2006. He was also recently seen in Lackawanna Blues (HBO) and in The Exonerated for CourtTV. On Broadway, Lindo appeared as Herald Loomis in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (for which he was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award), Master Harold and the Boys (Broadway & National Tour), and as Walter Lee in the Kennedy Center and Los Angeles productions of A Raisin in the Sun.