Literature has no geographical border and can so easily relocate and migrate into our literary imagination. The only real difficulty facing such crossings is the ever-present language barriers that have for too long limited the ways in which the Caribbean is read, perceived and interpreted. What is distinctive about Border Crossings: A Trilingual Anthology of Caribbean Women Writers is its trilingual nature; all of the stories appear in English, French and Spanish. To date, no anthology of short stories from the Caribbean region has accomplished this.The anthology includes stories from Guadeloupe (Gisèle Pineau), Trinidad ( Shani Mootoo), Haiti (Yanick Lahens), Jamaica (Oliver Senior), Puerto Rico (Carmen Lugo Filippi ) and Cuba (Mirta Yáñez). Many stories in the collection do not offer the reader a comforting end.Instead, they suggest the possibilities and the complexities of depicting a Caribbean, not singular but plural, not closed but open-ended and decidedly one without borders.
“This collection gives additional exposure to Caribbean women writers, and at the same time the focus on border-crossing also safeguards against the impression that the writers’ gender is the only significant aspect of their stories. The stories chosen would all make excellent reading in a university classroom.”—Marc Brudzinski, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami.
Nicole Roberts is Lecturer, Spanish and Hispanic Literature, Department of Liberal Arts, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published in Contexto:Revista Anual De Estudios Literarios, Journal of West Indian Literature, Small Axe and Política y Cultura. Her most recent publication is Main Themes in Twentieth Century AfroHispanic Poetry: A Literary Sociology.
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshawis Senior Lecturer, French and Francophone Literature, Department of Liberal Arts, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has published in Callaloo and Small Axe and has co-edited, with Martin Munro, two books on the Haitian Revolution: Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks and Echoes of the Haitian Revolution 1804–2004. Her first collection of short stories, Four Taxis Facing North, was published in 2007.
