- This event has passed.
Olive Senior, A Reading and Conversation, Monday, 8 Feb. at 4pm in the Judaica Suite (Special Collections, 2nd Floor, Smathers Library)
February 8, 2016 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Olive Senior
A reading and conversation
Monday, 8 February at 4:00 pm in the Judaica Suite (Special Collections, 2nd Floor Library East)
Olive Senior will read from her poetry and fiction and discuss Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, her recent prizewinning book which exposes a little known side of a monumental story.
This event is sponsored by the George A. Smathers Libraries, the Department of English, the Department of History, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, MFA@FLA, Amherst College, and the University of Miami.
Author of over 16 books, Olive Senior is one of the most prominent contemporary Caribbean writers, having won prominent prizes for her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. Senior has worked internationally as a creative writing teacher and lecturer on Caribbean literature and culture. She is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Toronto and has taught in the writing programs at University of Toronto, St Lawrence University, Barnard College, and Columbia University In the 1970s and 1980s, she worked as a journalist for the Jamaican Daily Gleaner and edited two leading journals in the Anglophone Caribbean: the Jamaica Journal and Social and Economic Studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, she published acclaimed works of fiction and poetry, including her short story collection, Summer Lightening (1986) which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and her poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics (1994) which won the F.J. Bressani Literary Prize and is required reading on the regional Anglophone Caribbean syllabus (CXC Cape). Her non-fiction works on Caribbean history and culture include Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal ,which won the 2015 OCM Bocas Literary Prize for Non-Fiction and the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book written about the Caribbean in 2015, as well as influential works such as Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (1991) and The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (2003).
Her work in recording and disseminating the cultural heritage of Jamaica was honored in 2003 with the Norman Washington Manley Foundation Award for Excellence and in 2004 with the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica. Her work is represented in numerous anthologies worldwide and has been translated into several languages.
This event is part of the Panama Silver, Asian Gold DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) at UF, University of Miami, Amherst College, and the University of the West Indies, Cavehill, Barbados. The event is being held in the Judaica Suite.