The PREE community is comprised of some of the most exciting voices in Caribbean writing. We are pleased to announce a robust roster of authors, each of whom will lead their own writing studio over the course of our four-day workshop.
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun (Norton/Liveright, July 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the bestselling novel, Patsy (Norton/Liveright, June 2019), which is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Financial Times Critics Choice, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book, and a Today Show Read With Jenna Book Club selection. Patsy has been named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, TIME, NPR, PEOPLE Magazine, Washington Post, Apple Books, Oprah Magazine, The Guardian, Goodhousekeeping, BuzzFeed, ELLE, among others. “Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness,” raves Time Magazine; and NPR names Dennis-Benn as “an indispensable novelist” for having written Patsy, “a brave, brilliant triumph of a book.” Dennis-Benn is a Lambda Literary Award Winner and a recipient of the National Foundation for the Arts Grant. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the New York Times Public Library Young Lions Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and long-listed for The Pen/Faulkner Award in Fiction and The Dublin Award Fiction Prize.
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
Marlon James
Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings, making him the first Jamaican author to take home the U.K.’s most prestigious literary award. In addition to the Man Booker Prize, A Brief History of Seven Killings won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Marlon James’ first novel, John Crow’s Devil, tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in the 1950s. Though rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication, John Crow’s Devil went on to become a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, as well as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, is about a slave women’s revolt on a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. The work won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, as well as an NAACP Image Award. James’ short fiction and nonfiction have been anthologized in Bronx Noir, The Book of Men: Eighty Writers on How to Be a Man and elsewhere, and have appeared in Esquire, Granta, Harper’s, The Caribbean Review of Books and other publications. His widely read essay, “From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself,” appeared in the New York Times Magazine. In early 2016 his viral video Are you racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer received millions of hits. His best-selling book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is the first in the Dark Star Trilogy, a fantasy series set in African legend. Black Leopard, Red Wolf was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in the Fiction category.
In April 2019 Marlon was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019 in the Pioneers category.
Kei Miller
Kei Miller is a poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer and a broadcaster. His 2014 collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. In April 2017 he won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for his novel Augustown. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature.
His poetry has also been shortlisted for awards such as the Jonathan Llewelyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year. His fiction has won the Una Marson Prize and has been shortlisted for the Phyllis Wheatley Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Formerly an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa, a Visiting Writer at York University in Canada, a Reader at the University of Glasgow (until 2014), and a lecturer at Royal Holloway, he is currently a Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. In 2018 he is a Judge of the Gordon Burn Prize.
Ingrid Persaud
Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud is the 2018 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award and the 2017 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her highly acclaimed debut novel Love After Love will be published in April 2020 at the top of Faber’s list. She lives in Barbados and London in a home she shares with The Husband, twin sons, a feral chicken and two rescue dogs.
Safiya Sinclair
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir How to Say Babylon. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year,” and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Sinclair’s other honours include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere.
She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Literature and Creative writing from the University of Southern California.
Garnette Cadogan
Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s a Senior Critic in the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His research and writing explore the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. He is the editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro), winner of the 2017 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Art Society of New York, and is at work on a book on walking. Born and raised in Jamaica, Cadogan is now a New Yorker who is found as often in other cities as much as the one he calls home.
Express Interest
We are currently accepting applications to the Pree 2022 Writing Studio! To express interest, please email a short sample of your work to preeliteditors@gmail.com, with Pree Writing Studio 2022 in the subject line. In the body of the email indicate a ranking of which writing studio you would like to participate in. Based on the quality of work, we will invite approximately 25-30 applicants to join us in May in Kingston. Pree staff will place you in a writing studio based on preference, availability, and best fit.
The deadline for applications is February 29, 2022.
PREE Writing Studio 