Nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist, and shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Maisy Card discusses her electric family saga These Ghosts are Family, a transporting debut novel that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations.

She will be in conversation with Cherie Jones, author of the debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, one of the most anticipated books of 2021. Cherie will be speaking from her home in Barbados. Her book is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town.

Their conversation will be led by Tiphanie Yanique, an award-winning poet and author of Land of Love and Drowning .

All authors appear for free and the best way you can support them is to buy their book. Maisy's and Cherie's books are available from Festival partner Watchung Booksellers here.

Maisy Card's writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Lenny Letter, The New York Times, Guernica and other publications. Maisy was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, an MLIS from Rutgers University and a BA in English and American Studies from Wesleyan University. She is currently an instructor for the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

Cherie S.A. Jones was born in 1974. She received a LL.B degree from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 1995, a Legal Education Certificate from the Hugh Wooding Law School, St. Augustine, Trinidad in 1997 and was admitted to the Bar in Barbados in October 1997. Cherie won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 1999. She won both the Archie Markham Award and the A.M. Heath Prize at Sheffield Hallam in the UK. A collection of interconnected stories set in a different small community in Barbados won a third prize at the Frank Collymore Endowment Awards in 2016.  She still works as a lawyer, in addition to her writing.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Tiphanie's novel, Land of Love and Drowning, 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, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014. Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.  Tiphanie is also the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5Under35.  She has been listed by the Boston Globe as one of the sixteen cultural figures to watch out for and her writing has been published in the New York Times, Best African American Fiction, The Wall Street Journal, American Short Fiction and other places. Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and received tenure from The New School before heading to the English Department at Wesleyan University as an associate professor, where she was also the Director of the Creative Writing Program. She currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Emory College of Arts and Sciences.

This event is part of Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival's special series of author events, Global Voices taking place on March 20 and March 21, 2021, and featuring authors and poets from England, Scotland, Ireland, Korea, Iran, Dubai, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and Spain.  The fifth annual Montclair Literary Festival will take place on Saturday October 2, 2021, with a combination of live and online events.

See all of the talks by following us on Crowdcast here or visiting our website events page here.

Any proceeds from the festival benefit parent organization, Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education and opportunity gaps in Essex County, NJ. You can read more about Succeed2gether and the festival at www.succeed2gether.org.

The festival organizing committee wishes to thank event partners Montclair Public Library and Watchung Booksellers, and festival sponsors Rao's, West of Hudson Realty Group, Jill Williams (Ameriprise Financial), Ferguson Dental, the County of Essex, and community members.

Caribbean Voices with Cherie Jones and Maisy Card