Caribbean Women’s Writing

Carole Boyce Davies is a Professor of English and Africana Studies. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of “Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject” and “Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones.” In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Dr. Boyce Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: “Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature”; “Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature”; and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled “Moving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing” (Volume 1) and “Black Women’s Diasporas” (Volume 2). She is co-editor with Ali Mazrui and Isidore Okpewho of “The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities” and “Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies.” She is the general editor of the three-volume “The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora” and of “Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiography, Essays and Poems.” Dr. Boyce Davies is also the author of the monograph “Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones” and the children’s book “Walking.”

Elaine Savory has published widely on Caribbean and African literature, focusing on women writers, poetry, theater, drama, and most recently postcolonial environmental humanities. She was a founding faculty member of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. Following “Out of the Kumbla,” co-edited with Carole Boyce Davies, Dr. Savory’s academic books are “Jean Rhys”; “The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys”; and “Wide Sargasso Sea at Fifty,” co-edited with Erica Johnson. Her collection of poems, “flame tree time,” came out in the Sandberry Press series, edited by Pamela Mordecai, and she has published poetry frequently (for example, in The Caribbean Writer, Sargasso, Wasafiri). Dr. Savory worked as a theater director in both Ghana and Barbados and has written on Caribbean and West African theater and drama. In 2019, she gave the Earl Warner Memorial Lecture at UWI, Cave Hill, and presented in the symposium on radical Caribbean theater, organized by Honor Ford-Smith (York University, Toronto). At The New School, NYC, Dr. Savory chairs Environmental Studies and teaches in Literary Studies. She guest-edited the first ecocritical issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature. Dr. Savory is presently completing a memoir and a monograph on Caribbean literature through the lens of postcolonial environmental humanities. Recent work includes readings of Kamau Brathwaite, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott, Pauline Melville, and Elizabeth Nunez. Dr. Savory will retire emerita in June 2021 to concentrate on writing.