Horsford to launch poetry chapbook at Writers Centre

Jannine Horsford will release her book Jurassic Coast at an upcoming event hosted by the Bocas Lit Fest.

Published by Peekash Press, Jurassic Coast is a sequence of poems inspired by Horsford’s time living on the south coast of England. The poems bring together a sensuous immersion in the rural landscape with the conundrum of being a stranger in a place imperfectly known, haunted by memories, a media release said.

“These poems have a sophisticated lightness of touch, always closely observed and brimming with sensory language and image," Hannah Lowe, author of the Costa Book Award-winning collection The Kids, said of Horsford's work in the release.

Horsford will be joined at the launch by guest poet Desirée Seebaran, winner of the 2021 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize, administered by the Bocas Lit Fest. Seebaran will read from her book in progress, and debut a chapbook version of a poem originally commissioned by the Bocas Lit Fest in 2020.

Horsford won a Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2022. The publication of Jurassic Coast is the final stage of her fellowship, which also included a cash award and a year’s mentorship.

The other Bocas Emerging Writers Fellow appointed in 2022 was fiction writer Rajiv Ramkhalawan, whose chapbook The Birthday Cake will be published simultaneously, and formally launched later in 2024.

The fellowships were made possible by donations from Canisia Lubrin, winner of the overall 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Dionne Brand, winner of the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize in the fiction category; Christina Sharpe, judge for the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize in the fiction category; and Allyson Holder, the release said.

Horsford will launch her debut poetry chapbook Jurassic Coast on September 28 at 3.30 pm, at the Writers Centre, 14 Alcazar Street, St Clair.

The event is free and open to all, and copies of the chapbooks will be available for sale from Paper Based Bookshop.