Join Us on 2/26 for a Caribbean Unit Launch Party!
Posted on January 27, 2025
Words Without Borders Campus is proud to present its new Caribbean unit to the public! Join us for a launch event with nine of the unit’s authors and translators. Featuring Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Frank Báez, Emiliana Bernard-Stephenson, Jean D'Amérique, Nathan H. Dize, Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro, Hillary Gulley, Hoyt Rogers, and Lawrence Schimel. We’re excited to host you for a celebratory evening of poetry and prose from across the Caribbean!
WWB Campus’s Caribbean unit, the site’s eighth full collection, introduces students and educators to 21 works of literature from the vibrant literary cultures of Caribbean countries and territories, including Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and more. Spanning stories, poems, essays, and comics, and featuring a critical introduction by Haitian scholar and writer Évelyne Trouillot (tr. Paul Curtis Daw), the Caribbean unit offers an entry point into important classroom topics such as migration, natural disaster, identity, and family history.
Each work of literature is paired with extensive multimedia resources to contextualize the literature and offer students paths of further exploration, as well as standards-aligned teaching ideas to help educators integrate the readings into their curricula.
Register for free on Eventbrite!
Tech and accessibility information
This event will be hosted on Zoom, which is available for download here. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Your display name should match the name you use to register for the event. You can change your Zoom display name by following these instructions.
In-app closed captioning and a full transcript will be available for this event. While in the meeting, you can toggle this on and off by clicking the “Live Transcription/CC” button at the bottom of your screen. You will not be able to turn on your own audio and video for this Zoom event. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please email Anna at [email protected] before Wednesday, February 12.
About the readers
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is a Puerto Rican writer. She’s published books that promote the discussion of Afroidentity and sexual diversity. She is the Director of the Department of AfroPuertoRican Studies, a performative project of Creative Writing based at the Casa Museo Ashford in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is also the founder and chair of Ancestral Black Women, in response to the call by UNESCO to celebrate the International Decade for People of African Descent. She was invited by the UN to speak about women, slavery and creativity in 2015 as part of the Remembering Slavery Program. Her short story collection Las negras, winner of the 2013 National Short Story Prize from the PEN Club of Puerto Rico, explores the limits of the development of female characters who challenge hierarchies of power. Caparazones, Lesbofilias and Violeta are some of her works which explore transgression from an openly visible lesbianism. She has also won the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture Prize in 2012 and 2015, and the National Award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in 2008. Her work has been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese.
Frank Báez might be described as the homegrown Junot Diaz of the Dominican literary scene: a native author rather than a son of the diaspora, but with the same “hip” originality and “with-it” verve. Born in 1978 in Santo Domingo, Báez has made a name for himself in his own country as the Dominican Republic’s most important young poet and short-story writer. His collection of stories, Págales tú a los psicoanalistas [For the Psychoanalysts, You Pick Up the Tab!] (Editorial Ferilibro, Santo Domingo, 2007) won the First Prize for Short Stories at the Santo Domingo Book Fair of 2006. With his fellow poet Homero Pumarol, he founded a “spoken word band” called El Hombrecito, which in 2009 cut a CD called Llegó el hombrecito [The Hombrecito Has Arrived]. He regularly gives readings accompanied by music, and is an amateur DJ. The quality of Frank Báez’s work has already won him an international following as well. His first book, Jarrón y otros poemas, was published in Madrid by Editorial Betania in 2004, and selections from his verse recently appeared in the Latin American anthology Cuerpo plural: Antología de la poesía hispanoamericana contemporánea (Editorial Pre Textos, 2010). His latest poetry collection, Postales, won the National Poetry Prize Salomé Ureña in 2009 as a manuscript, and was published in Costa Rica and Argentina even before it appeared in the Dominican Republic. As editor of the online poetry review Ping Pong, he has published scores of poets from Latin America, North America, and Europe. Highly conversant with the literatures of all three continents, he is a distinguished translator of English and American verse.
Emiliana Bernard-Stephenson is a writer, educator, feminist, and the Colombian ambassador to Jamaica. Born in the San Andrés and Providencia islands, she is part of the Raizal community. She holds a master’s degree in Caribbean Studies and has worked as a TV journalist, editor, and columnist. In 2019, she was named Afrocolombian Journalist of the Year by El Espectador and the Fundación Color Colombia for her work at the regional news network Teleislas. In the same year, she received the President’s Award from the Caribbean Broadcasting Union. Bernard-Stephenson writes in her mother tongue, the English-based San Andrés y Providencia Creole (or Kriol). In recent years, she has sought to promote and preserve the language, including by highlighting it in her journalistic work.
Born in Haiti in 1994, Jean D’Amérique is a multi-awarded poet, playwright, rapper, and novelist. The author of several plays and collections of poetry, he has received the Prix de Poésie de la Vocation for No Way in the Skin without This Bloody Embrace (Cheyne, 2017 / Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022) and the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté for his first novel, A Sun to Be Sewn (Actes Sud, 2021 / Other Press, 2023).
Nathan H. Dize is a translator of Haitian and Francophone Caribbean literature. His translations include the novels The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, Duels by Néhémy Pierre-Dahomey, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He has translated poetry and short prose from French and Haitian Creole (Kreyòl) by Jean D’Amérique, James Noël, and Évelyne Trouillot. He is also a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective and the co-editor of the Global Black Writers in Translation Series at Vanderbilt University Press.
Anabel Enríquez Piñeiro (Santa Clara, 1973) is an award-winning Cuban fantasy writer and essayist. She is the author of the story collection Nothing to Declare (Casa Editora Abril, 2007), and her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Secrets of the Future (Thirst for Beauty, 2005), Chronicles of Tomorrow: 50 Years of Science Fiction in Cuba (Ediciones Letras Cubana, 2009), Time Zero (Casa Editora Abril, 2011), The Apex Book of World Science Fiction II (Lavie Tidhar, 2009), Progression Therapy and Other Stories (Isliada.com. digital edition, 2012), and Dreaming in Vrindavan and Other Stories By Women (La Pereza Ediciones, 2014). Her stories, articles, and essays appear on several international websites and in e-zines and print publications from Spain, Argentina, Israel, the United States, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. She is a founding member of the Espiral fantasy writing workshop, and is active as a promoter and organizer of fantasy events and festivals. In 2013, she moved to Miami, Florida, with her husband and daughter, where she studies graphic design at the South Florida Institute of Technology.
Hillary Gulley is a writer and translator from Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Raised in West Virginia, she also lived in Spain, Hungary, Cuba, and Italy before moving to New York City in 2007. In 2012, she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her work on Marcelo Cohen’s The End of the Same. In 2013, she was awarded an NEA Fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center, where she was a returning resident in 2015. Her work includes a translated anthology of contemporary Cuban short stories entitled Cuba in Splinters, Eleven Stories from the New Cuba (O/R Books, 2014). Her forthcoming works include Kazbek by Ecuadorian writer Leonardo Valencia (Autumn Hill Books, 2017). In addition to her full-time translation work, Hillary teaches composition, narrative, and poetry at CUNY—Queens College.
Hoyt Rogers is an award-winning translator, essayist, poet, and novelist. He has published many books; he has contributed poetry, fiction, essays, and translations to a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies. His latest works are a poetry collection, Thresholds (MadHat Press); the novel Sailing to Noon (Spuyten Duyvil), book one of The Caribbean Trilogy; a chapbook of prose poems, Canvases (Mudlark); a translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s The Wandering Life (Seagull Books); and a translation of Marco Simonelli’s Will: Shakespearian Sonnets (Spuyten Duyvil). For more information, please visit his website, hoytrogers.com.
Lawrence Schimel (New York, 1971) is a full-time author, writing in both Spanish and English, based in Madrid, Spain, who has published over 130 books in a wide range of genres. His picture books have won a Crystal Kite Award from SCBWI (twice), a White Raven from the International Youth Library in Munich, and have been chosen by IBBY for Outstanding Books for Young People with Disabilities (three times), among other honors. His writings have been translated into over sixty languages, including Korean, Filipino, Xhosa, Changana, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Farsi, Icelandic, and Basque. In addition to his own writing, he is a prolific literary translator, primarily into English and into Spanish, who has published over 190 books. His translations into English have won a Batchelder Honor from the American Library Association and a PEN Translates Award from English PEN (three times), among other honors. His most-recent book is HaiCuba / HaiKuba: Haikus About Cuba in English and Spanish, co-written with Carlos Pintado, illustrated by Juan José Colsa (NorthSouth Books) which has won a Eureka Award Honor, an Ada-Campoy Award Honor, a NYPLY Best Children's Books of 2024, and a Bank Street Best Children's Book in Spanish 2025. He is the former Editorial Director of children's publisher Ediciones NorteSur, and is the founder and publisher of poetry press A Midsummer Night's Press. He served 2 terms as co-chair of the Publishing Triangle, the organization of LGBTQ+ publishing professionals in the USA, and also founded the Spain chapter of the Society of Children's Books Writers & Illustrators and served as Regional Advisor during five years.