ACWWS - Executive Board

ACWWS Executive Committee

Current Board Members :

Meredith M. Gadsby, President
Meredith M. Gadsby is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Oberlin College. She has several teaching and research interests, including International Black Literatures, Literatures of the African Diaspora, Black Women’s Writing, Cross Cultural Theories, and Migration Studies. Much of her work is preoccupied with issues of migration and identity. Ms. Gadsby’s research has taken her to Barbados, the United Kingdom, Ghana, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, and Grenada. At Oberlin she teaches courses in African American, African and Caribbean Literatures. Her first book, Little Salt Won’t Kill You: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration and the Politics of Survival is published by University of Missouri Press (July 2006).
Email: meredith.gadsby@oberlin.edu

Australia Tarver, Treasurer
Associate professor of English at Texas Christian University, teaches African American literature, contemporary American literature, and African and multi-ethnic literatures. She has contributed to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Winds of Change (Adell Newson, ed), Arms Akimbo (Janice Laddell and Yakini Kemp, eds.), MaComÉre, College Literature, Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women and African American and Native American Literature (Maria del Mar Gallegos and eds.).
Email: A.Tarver@tcu.edu

Rhonda D. Frederick, Secretary
Rhonda D. Frederick teaches Caribbean and African American literatures and cultures at Boston College. She is also interested in 20th Century popular fiction (futurist fiction and fantasy, detective/mystery fiction), and literatures of the African Diaspora. Her research interests are in Post-colonial Studies, Cultural Studies, and narratives of migration. Her first book "Colón Man a Come": Mythographies of Panamá Canal Migration (Lexington Books, 2005) examines Caribbean literature’s recurrent figure of the Panamá Canal worker.)
Email: frederir@bc.edu

Hyacinth Simpson, Publications Editor
Email: simpson@ryerson.ca

Juliet Emanuel George, Acquisitions Archivist
(biography forthcoming)

Vicki Silvera, Archivist, Permanent Collections
(biography forthcoming)

Past Board Members :

Evelyn Hawthorne, Immediate Past President
Evelyn J. Hawthorne is Professor of English at Howard University, and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Caribbean Literature and in Theory and Criticism. She has written extensively on Caribbean women writers, including articles on Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Mary Seacole, Edwidge Danticat and on the Sistren Women’s Theatre in journal publications that include Journal of West Indian Literature, ARIEL, World Literature Written in English, MELUS, Macomere and Biography. Dr. Hawthorne is the author of the scholarly book The Writer in Transition: Roger Mais and the Decolonization of Culture. She serves as Director of the Caribbean Studies Program at Howard University, and is President of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Dr. Hawthorne received her M.A. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of Minnesota.
Email: ehawthorne@fac.howard.edu

Helen Pyne Timothy, Founding President
Helen Pyne Timothy, founder and inaugural President of the ACWWS, was at various times Dean and University Dean for the Faculty of Arts and General Studies at the University of the West Indies St Augustine ,Trinidad. She has also been inaugural Chair of the Department of Language and Linguistics at that institution. Over the last ten years she has been visiting professor at several US Universities - including Cornell, UCLA , UCSB, and Marymount. She has taught several courses in Caribbean Linguistics, in African-American Literature and Caribbean Culture and Society, including the work of Black Women Writers. She has published in these areas. Now retired, she has remained an active scholar, continuing to study the works of Caribbean and African-American Women Writers and to make a contribution through evaluating works for Macomére, and by attending the ACWWS Conferences.
Email: timoehp@trinidad.net

Tanya R. Saunders (treasurer from X to Y)
Assistant Provost and Dean of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College. A founding member of the ACWWS and former ACWWS treasurer, she is also a contributing editor for MaComere. With Carlos Moore and Shawna Moore, she co-edited African Presence in the Americas (Africa World Press, 1995).
Email: tsaunders@ithaca.edu

Meredith Gadsby, Secretary

Founding Members :

Carole Boyce Davies
Email: cboyced@fiu.edu

Jacqueline Brice-Finch, Founder
Jacqueline Brice-Finch is one of the founders of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. She served as the Publications Editor of ACWWS [1998-2004]. She was the Editor of the ACWWS Newsletter from 1997-8 and Editor of MaComére, volumes 1-4 [1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001]. She holds the rank of Professor of English and is the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Benedict College in Columbia, SC. She has taught at James Madison University; the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix. She is the co-editor of Get It Together: Readings in African American Culture (2003) and has lectured widely in the Caribbean, U.S., and Turkey on Africana literature.
Email: bricefinch@aol.com

Tanya R. Saunders
Email: tsaunders@ithaca.edu

Vicki Silvera