[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Tiphanie Yanique will be the keynote speaker at the 55th Annual Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Convention, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from March 7 to 10, 2024.

Tiphanie Yanique is that rare writer who has received critical acclaim and awards in three literary genres: poetry, novel, and short stories.  She is also an outspoken activist on behalf of the Caribbean Diaspora, having appeared on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, and published a passionate op-ed in The New York Times on the US response to hurricanes in the Caribbean. 

Her second novel, Monster in the Middle, was published by Riverhead Books in October 2021 to wide acclaim. Vulture praised her as “one of the most inventive and talented stylists of her generation.” Her poetry collection, Wife (Peepal Tree Press UK, 2015), won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Her debut novel, Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead Books, 2014)—the focus of our annual NeMLA Reads Together initiative—won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, among other honors. Her debut collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, (Graywolf Press, 2010) was a 2010 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She has additionally been awarded the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, O Magazine, and other outlets.

Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.

Some of the Caribbean-themed sessions at NeMLA 2023 will be:
20310. Storytelling and Popular Folklore in Latin America and Caribe (Panel)
20403. Unpacking Surplus in the Novels of Tiphanie Yanique (Panel)
20439. Caribbean Women’s Spacetime Re-imagined (Roundtable)
20456. Translating Caribbean Surpluses (Roundtable)
20542. Linguistic Surplus: Intersectionality and the Multilingual Caribbean in Literature (Panel)
20551. Poetics of Dissent: Caribbean Cartographies of Belonging (Roundtable)
20691. Caribbean Literature and Media: U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico (Panel)
20727. Latin American and Caribbean Book-Art-Objects and their Readers (Seminar)
20795. De la sombra a la luz: Mujeres cineastas en el audiovisual cubano (Seminar)
20808. Recent Work of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (Panel)

See the complete list at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP.

For more information, see https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html and https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/specialevents/keynote.html

[Photo above from https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/10/er_phillis_wheatley_reading_monster_yanique/campus.html]