Jeremy Jacob Peretz and Joan Cambridge-Mayfield

Jeremy Jacob Peretz (San Francisco, USA, 1987) is author of Jombii Jamborii (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), a chapbook of poems written and translated collaboratively with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield in both Guyanese Kriiyaliiz (Creolese) and English. Jeremy’s scholarship has been widely recognized with fellowships and grants including from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Institute of American Cultures, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy’s essays, poems, and films are available through such publications as African American Review, Anthropology News, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of Africana Religions, New West Indian Guide, and Postcolonial Text. Jeremy holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California at Los Angeles and teaches in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.

Joan Cambridge-Mayfield (Georgetown, British Guiana, 1940) is an environmental protector, Afro-feminist activist, former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home. In the 1970s Joan served Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. By the 1980s Joan walked away from an appointed scholar’s desk at the Library of Congress to head for the Guyana rainforest, where she spent nearly two decades immersed in her environment, researching, writing, and working on her parcel of the “last of pristine Amazonia” at Yukuriba Falls on the Essequibo River. More recently, productions of Joan’s musical drama have received support from the United Nations. Her writing has appeared in the Antioch Review and was anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present.