Author Biographies

Ann Margaret Lim — of Afro-Jamaican and Chinese descent, has two published books of poems, The Festival of Wild Orchid and Kingston Buttercup. She was featured in Ebony Magazine after her 2014 debut at the Calabash Lit Fest. She has represented Jamaica in poetry festivals in Latin America, and her work is published in UK, Caribbean and US anthologies.

Hannah Lowe is a British writer, known for her collection of poetry Chick (2013) and family memoir Long Time, No See (2015). She began writing poetry at the age of 29 after her Jamaican-Chinese father died and her English mother had a stroke, later reflecting: “I had been suppressing a lot of grief over a sustained period of time and poetry… opened a door on that pain. I found that I could revisit the past in my poems, and contain it, or alter it even.”

Following a suggestion by John Glenday at a course in 2010, Lowe began to write about her father — who had sailed from Jamaica to Britain on the SS Ormonde in 1947 — and this led to her debut poetry collection Chick, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. This work was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Adelburgh First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, the Poetry Book Society included Lowe in its list of Next Generation Poets, published each decade. She has published other collections of poems focused on the Chinese-Jamaican story.

Kerry Young —Is a British writer, born in Jamaica. She is the author of three well received and interlinked novels: Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me a Mountain (2016).  Born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Chinese father and a mother of mixed Chinese-African heritage,  Young migrated to England when she was 10 years old.  Her first novel, Pao, is told in the voice of the book’s Chinese-Jamaican main protagonist. Young’s next two novels were also, like Pao, set in mid-20th-century Jamaica “against a backdrop of social change and political upheaval, telling three people’s interlinked stories of struggle and redemption, love and ambition, race, class, gender and colour in a country at a crossroads.”

As stated on the British Council website: “Her fiction has been praised for combining family history, deep research and the expressive power of patois. By doing so, it brings the global realities of Chinese identity to life. And she celebrates the underappreciated impact of Chinese culture on the modern Caribbean, making a powerful case for a new understanding of Jamaican urban life.”

Sharon Leach is a Jamaican writer and essayist, born in Kingston. In addition to being a featured columnist for the Jamaica Observer, she is the coordinator and editor of that publication’s weekly literary arts supplement, “Bookends”. Her fiction has appeared in several journals, including: Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Writing Today and, most recently, AfroBeat Journal. 

Sharon Leach was one of the first recipients of a scholarship to the Calabash Writers Workshop and, in 2011, she was awarded the Musgrave bronze medal from the council of the Institute of Jamaica. Her first collection of short stories, What You Can’t Tell Him: Stories, was published in 2006.

Visual Artist Biographies

Albert Chong — Chong was born in Jamaica where his parents ran a grocery store and his father was a well-respected justice of the peace. His multicultural heritage is described in an L.A. times article: “Half-Chinese, half-Jamaican Chong was raised Catholic but has followed Rastafarianism, the Ethiopian-inspired political/religious movement, and Santeria, the syncretic religion forged by African slaves living under Christian domination in the Caribbean.” 

Chong immigrated permanently to the United States in 1977, settling first with his sisters in Brooklyn. He attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1978 to 1981, and in 1981, Chong started his exhibiting career. In 1988, his family moved to San Diego, and Chong attended the University of California, San Diego. In 1991, Chong received his Master of Fine Arts degree from that university.

Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow was born in Manchester, Jamaica to a Chinese-Jamaican father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. Says Lyn-Kee-Chow, “The African diaspora, European colonialism and Chinese migration make-up significant parts of my origin story. The ancestral convergence in Jamaica (slave owners, slaves and migrant workers) followed by my family’s immigration to the United States, informs my artistic practice.” She is best known for her work in performance art. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and is a mentor in the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program.

Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City

Jacqueline Bishop is the author of a novel, The River’s Song, two collections of poems, Fauna, and Snapshots from Istanbul, an art book, Writers Who Paint… Three Jamaican Artists, and most recently, The Gymnast and other Positions, a collection of short stories, essays and interviews, which won the non-fiction award in  2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.