The Center for Fiction will welcome Marcia Douglas (2020 Awardee) for a conversation about The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, a new novel continuing the “speculative ancestral project” she started in 2018 with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. She will be joined in conversation by Ken Chen, Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College of Columbia University. This reading and conversation about Douglas’s poetic, eco-spiritual novel, and the work of cultural preservation through literature will be followed by a book signing and reception featuring Jamaican food and music. The event will be live streamed.

Marcia Douglas’s novel The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive unfolds via “dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs” and the imagined lens of Zora Neale Hurston’s camera, tracing stories that chart three centuries of the Jamaican experience of loss, survival and deliverance. Time maintains its fluidity through the journeys of characters who move between dream, memory and imagination, and between self and other. This immersive work acts as a keeper of herstory, archiving and preserving ancestral knowledge and resistance.