Founding Series Editor

Kwame Dawes is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica. He is the author of twenty-two books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent book of poetry, Mortality (Peepal Tree Press, 2025), is a cycle of poems written with John Kinsella. Dawes is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University and the founding director of Calabash International Literary Festival and the African Poetry Book Fund. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His awards include an Emmy, the Felix Dennis (Forward) Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, and the Windham Campbell Prize for poetry.

 

Editorial Team Members

Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar, award-winning poet, and writer. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Self-Portrait as Othello, which won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023 — the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize; it is one of the rare books to have accomplished this feat. His other books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire, and his latest publication, The Possibility of Tenderness (2025), a work of literary nonfiction. Jason holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. He is a full professor in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal.

Tanya Batson-Savage is a writer, filmmaker, publisher, and creative consultant. She is publisher and editor in chief of the award-winning independent publishing house, Blue Banyan Books (and its imprint Blouse & Skirt Books). She is also co-founder of the production company – Have a Bawl Productions. Tanya produced and storyedited the short films Agwe (2018) and A Shade of Indigo (2023).  Her play Woman Tongue received 8 Actor Boy Award Nominations (2016) and her short film script “Endeavour” earned Best Script (Kingstoon Anime Festival, 2013). Tanya is a Fellow of the Calabash International Literary Festival and Cropper Residential writing workshops and the British Council (Jamaica) Film Lab. She earned a JAFTA/Porter Screenwriting Fellowship (2020) and Rotterdam Producer Lab Fellowship (2024). Her non-fiction has been widely anthologized and she’s authored Pumpkin Belly and Other Stories and My Name is Mary a biography of Mary Seacole for children.

Malika Booker, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian parentage, lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University, and co-founded Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). Their Anthology Two Young, Two Black, Too Different, Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen celebrates MPK’s twenty-year anniversary. Her pamphlet Breadfruit received a Poetry Society recommendation, and her poetry collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, Complete Works Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). She is the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single poem twice: The Little Miracles (2020) and Libation (2023).

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons, and Far District and Fugitive Tilts, a book of essays.