Poet Laureate of Barbados to Deliver the 9th Patricia Charles Memorial Lecture
The UWI Open Campus Saint Lucia in collaboration with the JQ Charles Group of Companies will be hosting The 9th Annual Patricia Charles Memorial Lecture on Thursday 25th April, 2019, at 7:00 p.m. The lecture venue will be the Conference Room of the Finance Administrative Centre, Pointe Seraphine, Castries.
Mrs Patricia Charles was a former Resident Tutor of the School of Continuing Studies in Saint Lucia (now The UWI Open Campus),who dedicated her life to the furtherance of the Arts, Education and Culture in her adopted home, Saint Lucia. Established in 2010, the Patricia Charles Memorial Lecture celebrates Mrs Charle’s life and work, and has become a much-anticipated fixture on The Open Campus Saint Lucia's annual calendar of events.
Delivering the lecture will be Ms Esther Phillips - Poet Laureate of Barbados and Editor of BIM - Arts for the 21st Century. Her provocative lecture title is “The Poet as Seer: An Examination of the Poet’s Role in the Society” is one which will no doubt lend itself to much thoughtful and animated discussion post lecture.
The public is invited to attend what is certain to be a most engaging presentation.
About Esther Phillips
Esther Phillips won the James Michener fellowship to the University of Miami where she gained an MFA degree in Creative Writing, 1999. She also won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets for her poetry thesis/collection and went on to win the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2001.
Her publications are: Chapbook, La Montee (UWI, 1983); When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, Kingston, 2003); The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009); Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press, 2015.)
Esther Phillips represented Barbados at the Poetry Parnassus Festival in London, 2012 and her poem “Word,” was selected by BBC Scotland to represent her country at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including Poetas de caribe anglophono (Casa de las Americas) and Give the Ball to the Poet (Cambridge-Homerton)), and in 2014 her poetry was recorded for the Poetry Archive in the U.K which regards her as "one of the significant poets writing in English.”
Most recently, some of her poetry has been translated into Spanish as part of a PEN project implemented by the University of Puerto Rico. The bi-lingual collection will be published by Peepal Tree Press later this year.
Esther Phillips is the editor of Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, founder of Writers Ink Inc. and the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair. She is producer of the CBC radio programme, What’s That You’re Reading? as well as Chair of the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment.
Esther Phillips was appointed Poet Laureate of Barbados in February 2018.
About The UWI
Since its inception in 1948, The University of the West Indies (UWI) has evolved from a fledgling college in Jamaica with 33 students to a fully-fledged, regional University with over 50,000 students. Today, The UWI is the largest, most longstanding higher education provider in the Commonwealth Caribbean, with three physical campuses in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and an Open Campus. The UWI serves 17 English-speaking countries and territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, The British Virgin Islands, The Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks and Caicos. The UWI’s faculty and students come from more than 40 countries and The University has collaborative links with 160 universities globally; it offers undergraduate and postgraduate degree options in Food and Agriculture, Engineering, Humanities and Education, Law, Medical Sciences, Science and Technology and Social Sciences. The UWI’s seven priority focal areas are linked closely to the priorities identified by CARICOM and take into account such over-arching areas of concern to the region as environmental issues, health and wellness, gender equity and the critical importance of innovation.
Website: www.uwi.edu
