Local writer, Dr Marina Ama Omowale Maxwell, has made it into Wikipedia and is also on the prestigious list of 400 only women writers in Contemporary Women Writers. A published writer, poet, journalist, lecturer in Creative Writing and a TV producer and scriptwriter, Dr Maxwell also founded the Writers Union of T&T in 1980. She is about to launch her next novel, The 8th Octave, an eco-political book in the magical realism mode later this year.
Her novel, Chopstix in Mauby, a metaphor of magical realism, is set in the Orisha compounds and 1970 rebellion of Trinidad, and her book of poetry, Decades to Ama, which she has called "bio-poetry," is "a deeply personal journey by a woman who is an elemental force in Caribbean writing," said the publishers and poems, which "offer a vision of the Caribbean in which destructive imagery and hope of regeneration hold equal power."
Her TV programme Violence Is Killing You, emerged from her PhD thesis research and the production of more than 100 local programmes for TTT. "Foreign media and video games are our crime schools" she said. Towards filling the need for "very urgent local developmental TV and media," Dr Maxwell will again this year hold classes in TV and TV Script Writing, and also in Creative Writing , this time especially for women writers, and in Basic Journalism in the East at a writers retreat from July to August.
Dr Maxwell has trained writers in communications and creative work throughout Trinidad and continues to do so. A former secretary of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in the UK, she has been active for decades in developing various forms of literary writing and the dramatic and media arts. She founded the Yard Theatre while living in Jamaica, and influenced all Caribbean theatre. Her book of plays is called Play Mas & Hounsi Kanzo. She was invited to be a commissioner for the Schomburgh Centre (New York Public Library) for the Preservation of Black Culture.
Dr Maxwell was chosen as one of the two delegates to ACLALS, the Commonwealth Writers Conference held in Uganda and travelled to writers meetings afterwards in Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.
Out of this, while detailed as a journalist for Radio Jamaica, came the formation of the Writers Union of T&T and her book, About Our Own Business of interviews and articles, including an interview with Chinua Achebe, Africa's renowned novelist et al. She has also been delegate to the Juries of Casa de Las Americas in Havana, Cuba. A paper presented there is also in the book.
