Windham Campbell prize winner Erna Brodber and award-winning poet Claudia Rankine discuss the annual Emancipation Day celebrations in Woodside, St. Mary Parish, the rural community in the hills of northeast Jamaica where Brodber was born and continues to make her home. Brodber and Rankine will explore Brodber’s longtime involvement with Emancipation Day, as well as considering the importance of black spaces in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Clips from Bury Mi Foot Chain, a documentary about the Woodside celebrations, will be integrated into the conversation.
Erna Brodber is a Jamaican activist, scholar and fiction writer.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).
She is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
Co-sponsor(s): the African American Studies Department Endeavors Colloquium, the Afro-American Cultural Center, and Department of English