THE HON. DR. LOUISE BENNETT-COVERLEY O.M., O.J., M.B.E., D. LITT (HON)
(September 7, 1919 – July 26, 2006)Poet / Musician / Folklorist
Born in Kingston, Jamaica Louise Bennett remains a household name in Jamaica, and indeed the wider Caribbean for over 50 years. She received her education from Ebenezer and Calabar Elementary Schools, St. Simon’s College, Excelsior College, Friends College (Highgate) and eventually the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art under a British Council Scholarship.

With her first dialect poem written at the age of fourteen, Miss Lou’s poems, stories, and commentaries embodied the spontaneity of the expression of Jamaicans.  In print, broadcast, and live performance, her work has validated the authentic mode of expression of the majority of the country’s inhabitants. Described as the "only poet who has really hit the truth about her society through its own language", and as an important contributor to her country of "valid social documents reflecting the way Jamaicans think and feel and live” Miss Lou has enthralled audiences throughout Jamaica and the Diaspora.  

An avid investigator and archivist of Jamaica folk traditions and music, she has lectured extensively in the Caribbean, United States, and the United Kingdom, and has represented Jamaica international, eventually being appointed Cultural Ambassador at Large for Jamaica.  Her distinguished contribution to the development of the Arts and Culture has been recognized with the Member of the British.Empire (1960), Norman Manley Award for Excellence (1973) Order of Jamaica (1974),  the Institute of Jamaica Musgrave Silver and Gold Medals for distinguished eminence in the field of Arts and Culture, the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of the West Indies (1983), Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from York University, Toronto, Canada (1998), and Jamaica’s third highest national honour -the Order of Merit (2001).

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Godfrey Sealy
Playwright / Actor / Director
A past president of the Trinidad &Tobago National Drama Association, Sealy began his career in the theatre with Helen Camps’ Tent Theatre in the 1980s and went on to write several successful plays. His plays have been staged in London and throughout the Caribbean. The most famous of which, One of Our Sons is Missing, his groundbreaking piece dealing openly with the issues of homosexuality and HIV/Aids.  Some of his other productions include Home Sweet Home, for which he and three other performers were arrested for using obscene language on stage, and Angel, a two-hander about a man’s encounter with a transvestite.  At the time of his death, at the age of 46, Sealy was working on a musical, Paradise Garage, geared towards youth with HIV.

In a life of advocacy, and using theatre to examine complex pressing issues Sealy, seemingly, was never one to shy away from controversy both on and off the stage.  He was one of the first people in Trinidad &Tobago to go public with being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.  In 2001, the Government denied a request for assistance from the National Achievers Fund because of his medical condition. “A 36-year-old man dying of Aids? How do I explain to the nation that this is someone who qualifies for the National Achievers Fund?” said then Social Development Mi nister Manohar Ramsaran, adding that applicants had to be “above moral and other standards.”

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Erik W. A. Stephenson (June 11, 1943 – June 30, 2006)
Designer / Technical Director
Erik Stephenson was born in the parish of St. James, Jamaica, the second son of the late Dr. Aldwyn and Josepha Stephenson.  A graduate of Munro College in Jamaica, he went on to studies at the Jamaica School of Arts; Edinburgh College of Art and Skerrys College in Scotland; The Art Students League of New York; Brooklyn College, where he earned a graduate fellowship in design and technical theater, and Marymount Manhattan College where he studied technical theatre and fine arts.

He mentored under the late Jamaican artists Carl Parboosingh, Barrington Watson, Edna Manley and the late Polish artist, Michael Lester.  His work has been displayed in both one-man and group exhibitions.  Most notable among his group exhibitions were “New Black Artists” at the Brooklyn Museum and Columbia University Law Library and its subsequent national tour 1968-71, “New York’s First Black Exhibition Since the Harlem Renaissance” (1968), and the “Pan African Art Exhibition,” Memphis, Tennessee (1984) with Nigerian artist Eprhaim Urevbu and Bill Wallace of the U.S.

According to Memphis newspaper reporter Wiley Perry, Stephenson “Using the simplest of color and form, he paints a portrait that is magnified to a level normally bigger than life. They are robust in scale, yet softly fused into almost a monochromatic palette.”

 For more than three decades Erik, was widely known throughout theatrical circles in New York City, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Memphis as a seemingly tireless scenic artist and technical director.  He has worked extensively with such companies as the New Federal Theatre, Negro Ensemble Company, Frank Silvera Writers Workshop, Black Spectrum Theater, and Caribbean American Repertory Theatre in New York; Ackloa/Musical Theater Southwest and Albuquerque Civic Light Opera Association in Albuquerque; and on special event shows for singers Patti LaBelle and Barbara Mandrell at the Apollo Theater.  He also taught technical theatre workshops at LeMoyne/Owen College in Memphis.  

Erik was technical director for the Caribbean Cultural Theatre 2003 production of Basil Dawkins’ Same Song… Different Tune, featuring Leonie Forbes and Shelly Thunder. 

Recognized by Operation Push with an Award of Excellence, which he received from the Rev. Jesse Jackson (1984),  Erik is also the recipient of a letter of achievement from LeMoyne/Owen College (1981), and first place Blue Ribbon award in a staff art exhibition at Columbia University Medical Center’s College of Physician & Surgeons, Bard Hall, (1968)

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Edward Ricardo Braithwaite
Edward Ricardo Braithwaite (born 1922) is a Guyanese novelist, writer, teacher and diplomat, best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people.   He received his education at Queen's College, Guyana, City College of New York, and ultimately University of Cambridge, from which he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in physics. A World War II veteran of the Royal Air Force, he reluctantly took up a job as a schoolteacher in the London East End after being unable to find work in his field after the war.  The book To Sir, with Love (1959) was based on his experiences there. While writing the book, Braithwaite turned to social work, in a job placing non-white children in foster homes for the London County Council. These experiences led to his second novel Paid Servant (1962).

Braithwaite's numerous writings have primarily dealt with the difficulties of being an educated black man in inhumane circumstances. His best known book To Sir, with Love was made into a film starring Sidney Poitier in 1967.

Braithwaite has also served as an educational consultant and lecturer for UNESCO; permanent representative to the United Nations for Guyana; Guyana's ambassador to Venezuela, lecturer New York University, and most recently Writer in Residence at Howard University in Washington, DC.

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Linton Kwesi Johnson
Poet / Journalist / Musician / Producer
Born in Clarendon, Jamaican in 1952, Johnson migrated to London in 1963.  A graduate of Tulse Hill Secondary School, he later studied Sociology at Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Whilst still at school he joined the Black Panthers, helped to organize a poetry workshop within the movement and developed his work with Rasta Love, a group of poets and drummers. In 1977, he was awarded a C Day Lewis Fellowship, becoming the writer-in-residence for the London Borough of Lambeth for that year. He went on to work as the Library Resources and Education Officer at the Keskidee Centre, the first home of Black theatre and art.

Since first having his poems in the journal Race Today in 1974, Johnson written Voices of the Living and the Dead. (his first collection of poetry) published by Race Today,  he has gone on to produce Dread Beat An' Blood (1975) by Bogle-L'Ouverture publishers, Inglan Is A Bitch (1980) published by Race Today, and Tings An' Times (1991) co-published by Bloodaxe Books and LKJ Music Publishers.  In 2002 Linton Kwesi Johnson became only the second living poet and the first black poet to have his work published in Penguin's Modern Classics series, under the title Mi Revalueshanary Fren.

Dread Beat An' Blood his first LP, released by Virgin in 1978 followed later that year by the film Dread Beat An' Blood, a documentary on Johnson's work. This was followed by four albums on the Island label: Forces of Victory (1979), Bass Culture (1980), LKJ in Dub (1981) and Making History LKJ, and under  Johnson's own record label, launched in 1981,  two singles by the Jamaican poet Michael Smith, Mi Cyaan Believe It and Roots, Tings An' Times (1991), LKJ in Dub: Volume Two (1992), More Time (1998).   The album LKJ Live in Concert with the Dub Band was nominated for a 1985 Grammy ® Award. As a journalist his 10-part radio series on Jamaican popular music, From Mento to Lovers Rock, aired on BBC Radio 1 and he was a reporter on Channel 4's The Bandung File. He also toured regularly with the Dennis Bovell Dub Band and produced albums by the writer Jean Binta Breeze and by jazz trumpeter Shake Keane.

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Glenville Lovell
Playwright / Novelist
The author of three novels, several short stories and a number of prize-winning plays, Glenville was born in Christ Church, Barbados, and grew up surrounded by sugar cane, shadows and word-magicians. With storytelling all around him: in kitchens, under flamboyant trees at night, in rum shops, he spent as much time picking dunks and golden apples from his backyard as he did "pickin' words from big-people mouths," as his grandmother used to say. Many of these stories turned up in his first novel Fire in the Canes (1995).

Published by Soho Press to wide acclaim, Fire in the Canes as was his second novel, Song of Night (1998). Already his new novel from Putnam, Too Beautiful To Die, introducing volatile black ex-cop Blades Overstreet as a new though somewhat reluctant hero, has garnered praise and comparisons to some of the most illustrious names in the mystery genre.

Having toured the globe as a dancer before becoming a writer, his novels have been compared by the Washington Post to “works by Morrison and Nabokov”, and New York Times have dubbed them “impressive”.  His novels and plays have representing Barbados at several international festival, including CARIFESTA (Caribbean Festival of Arts).  Lovell is the 2002 winner of the Frank Collmore Literary Award for his play “Mango Ripe! Mango Sweet!”

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Trevor Rhone
Playwright / Filmmaker / Director /Actor
Trevor Rhone was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 24 March 1940 into a large family.  A graduate of the Rose Bruford College in Kent, England his writings provide cinematic and theatrical windows into the complex sociology of “blackness” in African Diaspora life in North America and the Caribbean. Much of his work entails explorations of the role of gender in the changing economic, social, and relationship landscape of Black Diaspora life.

In a career spanning over forty years, Mr. Rhone’s contribution to Jamaica’s cultural development is phenomenal.  Instrumental in the development of an indigenous Jamaican film and theater industry, Mr. Rhone’s work is reflective of the beauty and contradictions found within Caribbean societies emerging from colonialism and fashioning their own identities. With scores of scripts for stage and screen to his credit, he is best known in the United States for his involvement with the Jamaica’s first locally produced motion picture The Harder They Come. The movie has become a cult classic and was an important factor in bringing reggae music to the attention of an international audience.

His other screenplay credits include Smile Orange (1974), Milk and Honey (1988), which won the Genie Award® for Best Original Screenplay at the Toronto Film Festival, and One Love (2003), which received high praise at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals.

Mr. Rhone is founder and resident playwright at Jamaica Barn Theatre in Kingston, the country’s first theater for the production of locally written theatrical works. His anthology of plays ‘Old Story Time’ (Longman Press, 1981) is in its 23rd printing and his most recent play, Bellas Gate Boy, will be published by MacMillan Press in 2007. He is completing a new play, Sweet Potato Pie, which looks at black life in New Orleans.

Mr. Rhone has been a guest lecturer at Harvard University and University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He is the recipient of the Jamaican government’s Commander of the Order of Distinction.  Other awards and honors presented to Mr. Rhone in recognition of distinguished and sustained contribution to Jamaica theater and film include: the Ward Theatre Season of Excellence Award (1988); Institute of Jamaica Gold Musgrave Medal (1988); the International Association of Black Professionals Cross Cultural Communication through the Theatre Arts Award (1989); Living Legend Award (1996) from the National Black Theatre Festival (U.S.); and Norman Washington Manley Award for Excellence (1996).

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Anthony C. Winkler
Anthony C. Winkler (born 1942), has been heralded by the Jamaica Gleaner as "the Caribbean's unrivalled master of adult comedy".   Educated at Excelsior College, Mt. Alvernia Academy and Cornwall College in Jamaica, he went on to earn Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in English, in the United States. He returned to Jamaica in 1975. He became a full-time freelance writer in 1976 after moving back to the United States.

His first novel, The Painted Canoe was published in 1984 by Kingston publishers (now LMH). The Lunatic followed in 1987, and Winkler also wrote the screenplay for a highly successful film of this novel.  Other works include The Great Yacht Race (1992), Going to Home to Teach (1995) and The Duppy (1997). In 1999 his original screenplay The Annihilation of Fish, was filmed in Los Angeles. Starring opposite James Earl Jones with Margot Kidder, Lynn Redgrave won Palm Beach Best Actress for her role as Poinsettia.

In 2004 Macmillan produced their first collection of Winkler's work in The Annihilation of Fish and Other Stories. His most recent title, Dog War, was released in 2006, and is printed in the United States by Akashic Books.  Mr. Winkler resides with his wife, Cathy, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

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Ainsley Burrows
Ainsley Burrows is a former member of the world famous NuYorican Café poetry slam team, a highly respected international poet and undoubtedly one of the finer surrealist poets of his generation.

After a childhood spent in Jamaica, he dabbled with poetry while studying for a BA in Accounting and eventually quit academia to write full-time in the first year of an MBA after a near-fatal accident caused him to re-evaluate his life. He emerged as a respected poet in New York in the late 1990s and soon visited the UK where he also gained a loyal following.

Ainsley has since read at several universities and colleges worldwide, and been featured at festivals such as the Wordstock Festival in New York and the Lancaster Literature Festival in the UK. He is the author of Black Angels with Sky Blue Feathers and The Woman who Isn't Was. He resides in New York and has recently completed his first novel.