A post by Peter Jordens // Tequila Minsky (Caribbean Life News) and Lavern McDonald (Caribbean News Now) report on the Caribbean presence at the recent Brooklyn Books festival. Here are excerpts from their articles.

“There are over a dozen Caribbean or Caribbean-Americans in this book fair,” beamed E. Wayne McDonald, artistic director of the Caribbean Cultural Theatre, as he finished up his conversation with Jamaican author Diana McCaulay outside of Brooklyn Borough Hall. [. . .] Earlier that day, writer McCaulay spoke on the panel entitled “Rolling the Dice” where the authors’ fictionalized main characters do risky business. In McCaulay’s book Huracan (hurricane god of Mayan mythology), the main character returns to Jamaica and grapples with: where does she fit and is this still home?

Concepts of power were addressed in the novels by the authors on the Idols, Gods and Kings panel where Cuban-American author and former journalist Cristina Garcia spoke of a fictionalized Fidel in her King of Cuba. From her imagination, she explored the substance of life behind the scenes. “People’s lives are their secret lives, not just those in public,” she said. Writer Teddy Wayne and renowned octogenarian author Tom Wolfe also dialogued with her.

Other Caribbean authors prominent on their respective panels included Guyanese, now from Grenada, Oonya Kempadoo (All Decent Animals) who is teaching this year in Connecticut as a Fulbright Scholar and Jamaican Colin Channer (Lover’s Rock) who combines political affairs of the day and sensuality. Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid, her fifth novel See Now and Then published this year, was a no-show due to personal emergencies.

Read the full article at Caribbean presence at 2013 Brooklyn Book Fest | Repeating Islands.