Featured Authors

Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He’s also been named one of Variety magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch. Desmond is the author of the gritty YA novel Your Corner Dark which confronts the harsh realities of gang life in Jamaica and how far a teen is willing to go for family. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters.

Diana McCaulay is a Jamaican environmental activist and writer, a lifelong resident of the capital city of Kingston. She has written five novels: A House for Ms Pauline (2025), Dog-Heart, Hurcan, Gone to Drift, White Liver Gal and Daylight Come. Diana has also self-published a collection of her newspaper columns called Writing Jamaica. She has won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region twice, in 2012 and 2022, and most recently, won the Elizabeth Nunez Short Story Prize for writers resident in the Caribbean at the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival in New York in September 2024. She was awarded the Norman Washington Manley Award in 2021 for Excellence for Protection and Preservation of the Environment and in 2022, a Gold Musgrave Medal for distinguished eminence in the field of literature by the Council of the Institute of Jamaica. 

Ishi Robinson was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. A Canadian citizen, she has lived in Bern, Toronto, Rome, London and now lives in Berlin with her Czech husband. Her first published work was a short story in Jamaica’s national newspaper when she was eleven years old. At seventeen, she sent a letter to her father from Switzerland that he thought was so funny he sent it to the other national newspaper, which snagged her a weekly column on teenage life in Kingston. She also previously wrote a weekly column on life as an expat in Rome for a now defunct online magazine. She got back into fiction writing in Berlin, from where she has published short stories in several online publications and one anthology. SWEETNESS IN THE SKIN is her first novel.

Julianne Mundle is the author of Shoot Your Shot and Come With the Fire. Receiving a BA from McMaster University, her creative nonfiction has been published in McMaster’s, The Silhouette and The Writers Collective of Canada’s third anthology entitled Front Lines. She is a young adult fiction writer, who writes powerful female protagonists who are too bold, too loud, too strong and rich in colour. Born in Manchester, Jamaica, Julianne lives in Brampton, Ontario, with her husband. When not writing, you can find her travelling home to her beloved island or reading stacks of books.

Lola Jaye is an author, registered psychotherapist and speaker who has penned six novels and a self-help book. She was born and raised in London, England and has lived in Nigeria and the United States. She currently works as a psychotherapist. She has written for CNN, HuffPost, Essence and the BBC and also speaks on mental health issues and racism. She has also appeared on national television, most recently discussing COVID-19 and mental wellbeing. Lola once gave a presentation on imposter syndrome – a subject close to her heart, because at times she’s unable to believe she’s an actual writer! The Attic Child is her first epic historical novel.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by the New York Times, as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.

Tiffany D. Jackson is the NYT Bestselling, award-winning author of YA novels Monday’s Not Coming, Allegedly, Let Me Hear A Rhyme, Grown, White Smoke, Santa in The City, The Weight of Blood, Marvel's STORM: Dawn of a Goddess and co-author of Blackout and Whiteout. A Coretta Scott King — John Steptoe New Talent Award-winner and the NAACP Image Award-nominee, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Film from Howard University and has over a decade in TV/Film experience. The Brooklyn native is currently splitting her time between the borough she loves and the south, most likely multitasking.