Weekly Photo Challenge: A Perfect Match…of Poets

There are lots of possibilities with this week’s challenge – and I found a couple of photos that reflect a “perfect match” of Jamaican creative people, all of whom I admire greatly. They are all poets!

Professor Edward Baugh and Ann-Margaret Lim on World Literature Day, 2014. (My photo)

Firstly, I took this photo of poet Ann-Margaret Lim with one of her mentors, Professor Edward Baugh at an event in celebration of World Literature Day at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, in September 2014. Ann-Margaret has two published volumes of poetry: The Festival of Wild Orchid (2012) and Kingston Buttercup (published last September, both by Peepal Tree Press). Professor Baugh, the winner of a Gold Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica, has written several scholarly works (including critiques of Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott) as well as several volumes of poetry. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

Another matching pair of poets is Canada-based Jamaican poet Pamela Mordecai and writer Earl McKenzie. Here Earl is reading, in animated fashion, from Pam’s poetry book Subversive Sonnets at its Jamaican launch in November, 2014 at Bookland in New Kingston. Ms. Mordecai is a prolific writer of poetry, short stories, text books, poems and stories for children, and newspaper articles and the recipient of a Bronze Musgrave Medal. Her first novel, Red Jacket was published in 2015. Earl McKenzie is a retired lecturer in Philosophy at UWI Mona, an educator par excellence and the author of several books of short stories and poetry. He also has a Musgrave Medal – a Silver one – for contributions to literature. He is also an artist! Click on his website link to see some of his work.

Earl McKenzie reads Pamela Mordecai’s poetry at the launch of “Subversive Sonnets.” (My photo)