West Indian Literature Conference

Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, ‘the Gaulin Woman’—so called for her dedication to folklore, is a poet, author, cultural historian and editor. She was invested in the Bahamas Order of Merit in 2021 for her contributions to literature, history and culture, subjects on which she has written, spoken, created documentaries and published at home and abroad. As a speechwriter, she has been the silent voice for major figures in government and business.

In 2015, the University of The Bahamas School of English Studies presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Culture and Literature. She was also first winner of the Bahamas Cacique Award for Writing (1995) and recipient of a Silver Jubilee of Independence Medal for Literature (1998). A finalist in the 2012 International Proverse Prize Competition, her poetry collection, Chasing Light, was published by Proverse Hong Kong.

Glinton-Meicholas has authored more 22 books, comprising story collections, sociopolitical essays, satirical works, a novel and collections of poetry and histories, the most recent (2022) being Masters of the Sea: Regatta and Sailing Tradition in The Bahamas. Her work appears in such publications as New Daughters of Africa (Myriad, 2019), Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (OUP 2016), Routledge’s Companion to International Children’s Literature and the Grove Dictionary of Art. Her monograph (Talkin’ Ol’ Story: A Brief Survey of the Oral Tradition of The Bahamas appears in the Encuentros series (No. 38, July 2000) of the Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Centre, Washington, DC. 

Among her major speeches, she counts a plenary session of the Heritage and Leadership Symposium at City Hall, London by invitation of the Mayor’s Office (2008), the 2012 Commencement address at The College of The Bahamas and the first Convocation Address of the University of The Bahamas (2017).

Patricia Glinton-Meicholas spent 17 years as faculty and administrator at The College/University of The Bahamas. She holds degrees from the University of Miami and the University of The West Indies.

Shalini Puri works on postcolonial and cultural studies of the global south with a focus on the Caribbean. Her research spans memory studies, environmental humanities, feminism, social movements, nationalism, indentureship and slavery, fieldwork, the arts, and everyday cultural practices. She is currently working on a project entitled “Poetics for Freshwater Justice: Postcards of the Caribbean Anthropocene.”

At Pitt, she is a member of the Race, Poetics, and Empire research group.

A founding member of the Pitt Prison Education Project, Puri is committed to diversifying the settings, methods, and reach of the humanities. She has taught Literature and Writing courses in which Pitt students and incarcerated students study together at a state prison. See a short video of student reflections from one of her prison courses.

Puri is also editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series New Caribbean Studies, which seeks to explore Caribbean self-understandings, to intervene in the terms of global engagement with the region, and to extend Caribbean Studies’ role in reinventing various disciplines and their methodologies well beyond the Caribbean. The series welcomes literary criticism and more broadly humanities-informed and interdisciplinary scholarship.