The Africana Studies Program welcomes their Fall 2025 Visiting Faculty Fellow Merle Collins for an exciting and engaging week of discussions. Join us for these upcoming events:
Monday, November 10, 2025
Welcome Reception
4:30 pm in Global Commons, Williams Hall
Tuesday, November 11, 2025 Public Lecture and Book Signing
"Society, History and the Voices of Caribbean Literature"
4:30 pm in Sinclair Auditorium
Thursday, November 13, 2025 Faculty Book Discussion*
"Rhythm, Rhyme, Recitation and the Shaping of Imagination"
12:00 pm in Williams 341
*RSVP Here by Fri, Nov 7
Friday, November 14, 2025
Dramatized Reading with Merle Collins
11:00 am in Drown 210
Merle Collins is a writer of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her most recent novel, inspired by the story of the Grenadian mother of Malcolm X, won the 2025 Caribbean Studies Association’s Barbara Christian Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (UK) and longlisted for the 2024 Bocas Prize for Literature (Caribbean).
Her novels are Ocean Stirrings: A tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (2023), The Colour of Forgetting (2023, 1995), La Couleur de l’oubli (French edition, 2023), Angel (2011, 1997); short story collections: Rain Darling (1997), The Ladies are Upstairs (2011); poetry collections: Lady in a Boat (2003), Rotten Pomerack (1992), Because the Dawn Breaks (1987); a biography, The Governor's Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe (2013). Her critical works include “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” chapter in Nicole Phillips-Dowe & John Angus Martin, ed., Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, and “Explorations of the Self,” chapter in Raphael Dalleo and Curdella Forbes, Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is also producer of a documentary, Saracca and Nation, exploring African influences on the culture of the caribbean island of Grenada and its sister isle, Carriacou. From 1995 to 2021, she taught Caribbean Literature at University of Maryland, College Park.