Guest Editors Brenda Lee-Browne, Beatrice Lamwaka, Rifat Munim & Peter Sipeli

Guest Editors Brenda Lee-Browne, Beatrice Lamwaka, Rifat Munim & Peter Sipeli

Brenda Lee Browne was born in London to Antiguan parents. She studied journalism and started her career in the Black British media before moving to Antigua in the mid-1980s. There, she wrote and published short stories and poetry as well as worked in the local media, both print and television.

Browne returned to the UK in the mid-1990s and gained an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University, whilst working managing an after-school program for African-Caribbean students. She also worked as a workshop facilitator with an anti-racism NGO.

In 2003, she established Just Write – Antigua to teach creative writing in Antigua. She worked with government agencies and, on a voluntary basis, with inmates at HMP. Browne is also a writer, and her work has appeared in several anthologies in the USA, UK and Canada as well as online. Her first novella, London Rocks, was published by Hansib Publications in the UK in 2018.

Brenda Lee Browne is presently a part-time lecturer at the Antigua and Barbuda State College, teaching Communication Studies and English Literature.  She joined the Hub Dot community in 2017 when the Antigua and Barbuda Hub Dot team was established and is now part of the Storytelling Experience Team.

https://www.instagram.com/justwriteantigua/


Beatrice Lamwaka writes for Global Press Journal, an international media organization that produces award-winning journalism. She is President, PEN Uganda. She has facilitated creative writing workshops in prisons in Uganda and edited a prison’s anthology. She also edited the East African anthology to be published by 8th House Publishing (forthcoming 2022). Her collection of short stories, Missing Letter in the Alphabet was published recently in Tamil. Her short stories are featured in: New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019) edited by Margaret Busby; Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction from Africa edited by Ellah Wakatama Allfrey; Caine Prize Anthologies: African Violet and Other Stories; and To See the Mountain and other Stories, New Writing from Africa 2009: Winning Stories Selected by J.M Coetzee by PEN South Africa. 

She won 2021 Janzi Award for Outstanding Fiction Writer and was awarded by Uganda Registration Service Bureau for her literary contributions in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2011 Young Achievers Award, was shortlisted for the 2015 Morland Writing Scholarship and the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing and was a finalist for the 2009 South African PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. She was a fellow at Stiftung Kunstlerdorf Schoppingen (Germany), Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency (Italy), Le Chateau de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence (Switzerland) and Art of Resilience – Salzburg Global Seminar (Austria).

@BLamwaka


Rifat Munim is an editor, journalist, bilingual writer, translator and essayist based in Dhaka. He was the literary editor of Dhaka Tribune, a Bangladeshi English daily. His editorial and journalistic work has been focused on presenting Bengali literature to an international readership through English translation. South Asian fiction written in English constitutes one of his major areas of interest. He was a jury member for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019.

His translations of Bengali fiction and poetry have been published widely in local and international newspapers and journals. His poetry translations are featured in Three Poets: Revised, Enlarged Edition with Bilingual Texts, edited by M Harunur Rashid and published by Bangla Academy, Dhaka. His essay on the stories and novels written by Bangladesh’s preeminent writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias has been included in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, edited by Jeremy Tambling. His articles on different aspects of Bengali literature as well as South Asian English writing have appeared in World Literature Today, English PEN, Scroll, Dhaka Tribune and The Daily Star.

Currently, he is working on an anthology of selected short stories from Bangladesh in English translation to be published by Bee Books, India (forthcoming 2022).

@MunimRifat


Peter Sipeli has more than two decades of expertise in using and managing advocacy through artistic expression. He is an Arts Manager and supporter of the Spokenword arts movement in Fiji. Peter founded The Poetry Shop, Fiji six years ago and facilitates regular poetry events in Suva and poetry circle discussions with new and emerging Fijian writers.

He works as a gay activist, using storytelling as advocacy. Peter founded the online arts magazine ArtTalk Fiji that, since its inception in 2017, has published 17 issues, showing arts in Fiji and across the region. From 2018 to 2020, ArtTalk Fiji was incubated at the Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies alongside a podcast series, an audio component to ArtTalk.

Peter is passionate about developing the literary arts in Fiji and addressing prolonged silences in the art form. A SLAM poet with a large following, he is a champion of the revival of the literary movement in Fiji, working to provide spaces for new and emerging poets and artists to enable the framing of authentic local voices.

Peter has published four collections of poetry and travels extensively to regional festivals to showcase this work and to further networks and opportunities for poets and writers in Fiji. In 2016, Peter was among seven presenters who participated in the inaugural Tedx Suva in which he spoke on ‘Storytelling for Advocacy’.

Peter is the Creative Director of the Centre for the Arts, Suva, Fiji’s first artist-led and community-focused arts centre, through a US Post-COVID economic recovery grant that is set to begin in May 2022.


Read the collection Speak Out!