Merle Collins to speak at UWI's Literature Week

Grenadian Merle Collins will be the feature author at UWI, St Augustine’s 2024 Campus Literature Week this week.

Currently writer in residence on campus, Collins will give a feature address at the literature week’s closing gala on March 15, from 5 pm at the Centre for Language Learning Auditorium.

The event, which began yesterday, is free and open to everyone. It is hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Education in partnership with the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, a media release said.

Collins is the author of numerous books of fiction and poetry, most recently the cross-genre book Ocean Stirrings. Subtitled A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings, and published in late 2023, the book explores “the almost hidden life” of the Grenada-born mother of the famed civil-rights activist.

Drawing on the title and themes of Ocean Stirrings, and her wide-ranging readings of other Caribbean authors, at the Campus Literature Week event Collins will speak on Oceanic Journeys in the Voices of Caribbean Literature.

Born in Aruba in 1950 to Grenadian parents, Collins was taken to Grenada shortly after her birth and grew up there. She did a degree in English and in Spanish at UWI in Mona, Jamaica, before returning to Grenada as a teacher. She has also taught in St Lucia. In 1980 she was awarded a masters in Latin American studies from Georgetown University, USA. She holds a PhD in government from the London School of Economics.

During the Grenada Revolution, she served as a co-ordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean for the government of Grenada.

She left Grenada in 1983 and taught for many years at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is now professor emerita.

Her novels include Angel (1987) and The Colour of Forgetting (1995), and Collins has also published three collections of poems, a biography of Grenada Governor-General Dame Hilda Bynoe, and several critical essays.

During her time as writer in residence at UWI, through the Department of Literary, Cultural, and Communication Studies, Collins has worked closely with students in the Creative Writing MFA programme.

“Merle Collins is an excellent choice for writer in residence,” says author and lecturer Muli Amaye, head of the MFA programme, in the release. “As a writer of poetry and fiction and an exceptional academic, the knowledge and creativity she brings are invaluable for our students. She slipped seamlessly into the department and her insights into students and their work are offered in a way that encourages them to continue and to stretch themselves further.”

Festival and programme director of the Bocas Lit Fest Nicholas Laughlin said, “Merle Collins was a headline writer at our first festival in 2011. We are happy to welcome her back, and delighted that readers here in Trinidad will have the rare opportunity to see and hear her in person on March 15 thanks to Campus Literature Week – an important fixture in our cultural calendar and a warm-up for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest at the end of April.”

Copies of Ocean Stirrings will be available at the event from Paper Based Bookshop.

The schedule of daily lunchtime readings and interviews with Paul Keens Douglas, Tony Deyal, Jasmine Sealy and Machel Montano is available at www.sta.uwi.edu/fhe/dlcc/news-events.