 Drisana
Deborah Jack
was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 1970, to Caribbean
parents. As a child her parents brought her to St.
Martin, her mother’s home island, where she was
reared in Cole Bay
village. Jack graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with an MFA in 2002
but by then had already co-founded and acted with the Teenage Acting
Company while attending the MPC high school, and published her first
poetry book, The Rainy Season (1997), in St. Martin. She
went on to exhibit her artwork in the Caribbean,
the USA, Europe, and Japan.
Jack, a Caribbean artist by “geography and cultural/spiritual location,
constructs ... a personal/cultural history based on ancestral or
re-memory using painting, video, photography, sound art, and poetry.”
Her poetry has appeared in The Caribbean Writer and Calabash.
Articles citing and reviewing her work have appeared in Today, The St. Maarten Guardian,
Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten, Artpapers Journal, Buffalo News, and in Fabian Badejo’s Salted Tongues – Modern Literature in St. Martin (2003). Jack has
recited her poetry and lectured on the cultural arts at readings
and festivals such as No To The Franco-Dutch
Treaty, CARIFESTA VI, VII, at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Miami
Bookfair International, Crossing the Seas, Poetry Africa, and Tradewinds.
A leading St. Martin poet and mother of one
daughter, Jack is an assistant art professor at New Jersey City University.
Awards and honors include a Caribbean Writers Institute Fellow (UM),
Prince Bernhard Culture Fund and New York Foundation for the Arts
grants, SUNY Buffalo Dissertation Fellowship, Photography Institute
fellow, Lightwork Artist-in-Residence (Syracuse University),
CEPA Exhibition Award, and a US National Endowment for the Arts
residency at Big Orbit Gallery. Skin is Jack’s second book of poems. |
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skin 
by Drisana Deborah Jack
Price: US$15
Paperback, poetry, literature, 71 pp. (2006)
ISBN: 0-913441-78-3
Compelling ... We are all migrants now,
children and
foundlings of diaspora.
– Darryl Accone, University of
Witwatersrand, South
Africa
Skin
takes us through blanket of night, seaweeds, the
embrace of the sea, interrupted sky, and rain storms.
- Jacqueline Goffe-McNish, State University
of New
York |
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The Rainy Season
by Drisana Deborah Jack
Price: US$15
Paperback, poetry, 108 pp. (1997)
ISBN: 0-913441-23-6
Here is a strong new voice which has come to
join the
chorus of inspired chanting of Caribbean women
poets.
- Lorna Goodison, University of Michigan-Ann
Arbor |
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