Wadadli Pen’s new prize pays tribute to accident victim, Zuri Holder
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Wadadli Pen logo (designed by Ken Shipley)
On the heels of launching the 2021 season of the Wadadli Pen Challenge with a March 26 submission deadline, the organisers have announced several additional and very meaningful patronages.
According to a release, Cedric Holder, father of Zuri Holder, who died tragically in a road accident in January, has requested inclusion of a plaque to honour his memory.
The Cushion Club Zuri Holder Achievement Award, inclusive of a gift certificate toward the purchase of books, will be awarded to a writer 12 years or younger.
We’re so excited to see that Olive Senior’s
Pandemic Poems: First Wave is now available! Here is a description, followed by recommendations by Faizal Deen, Rachel L. Mordecai, and Geoffrey Philp.
Description: Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series
of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic – an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020.
The Wadadli Pen 2021 Challenge invites reflection on ‘2020’
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The Wadadli Youth Pen Prize returns with its latest challenge to writers and artists in Antigua and Barbuda. As in the past, the 1,000-word (maximum) entries – of any literary genre or sub-genre – should be Caribbean in spirit. Entrants can write about anything but there is, also, an optional themed challenge.
The arts often flourish in difficult times as a way of channeling and expressing, also escaping, the turmoil and complexities of that time. For that reason, and the cathartic relief it can offer, Wadadli Pen looks back to ‘2020’, a year which has become a euphemism for struggle and uncertainty, as an optional sub-theme of the 2021 Wadadli Pen Challenge, with a reminder to reflect, imagine, and make it Caribbean. Both written and art-text combos (ie storytelling using both written and visual art) are welcome.
Yes Magazine shares an excerpt from Stella Dadzi’s
Yes Magazine. Many thanks to Peter Jordens for all related links.]
In her new book,
A Kick in the Belly, Afrocentric British historian Stella Dadzie describes how her research into slavery-era documents reveals the lives of enslaved Black women in the Caribbean colonies and the American South. The phrase “kicked in the belly” summarizes the abuse enslaved women endured but they also resisted, rebelled, and kicked back. “These women’s response,” she writes, “can be seen as a metaphorical kick in the belly for those who tried and failed to dehumanize them.”
The Everyday Resistance of Enslaved Women
Photo by Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Studying history is like detective work especially when the rebellion of Black women has been left out of the story.
In her new book, A Kick in the Belly
, Afrocentric British historian Stella Dadzie describes how her research into slavery-era documents reveals the lives of enslaved Black women in
the Caribbean colonies and the American South. The phrase “kicked in the belly” summarizes the abuse enslaved women endured but they also resisted, rebelled, and kicked back. “These women’s response,” she writes, “can be seen as a metaphorical kick in the belly for those who tried and failed to dehumanize them.”