Anthony Kellman is a Barbados-born writer and musician educated at Combermere School, at the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill) and in the U.S. He became internationally recognized in 1990 when the British publishing house, Peepal Tree Press, published his first full-length book of poetry, Watercourse, which was endorsed by the late Martiniquan poet Edouard Glissant and which launched Kellman’s international writing career. Since 1990, he published two novels, four CD recordings of original music, and three additional books of poetry including Limestone: An Epic Poem of Barbados, the island’s first published epic poem that covers four centuries of Barbadian life.[1] In 1989 he became the first English-Speaking Caribbean writer of the post-colonial era to secure a tenure-track professorship in creative writing at a U.S. university. In 1992 he edited the first full-length U.S. anthology of English-speaking Caribbean poetry, Crossing Water and, in 1993, became the first English-Speaking Caribbean writer to win a U.S.A National Endowment for the Arts literary award. Kellman is the originator of the Caribbean poetic form, Tuk Verse, a poetry form in three "movements" derived from melodic and rhythmical patterns of Barbados' indigenous folk music called Tuk.[2]

Early Life

Kellman was born in Whitehall, St. Michael, the last child of Evelyn Verona (née Rock), a homemaker, and Lewin Livingstone Kellman, a chauffeur with the family of Maurice Cave, founder of Cave Shepherd and Co. Ltd. His love of World Music was fueled by his sister, Angela, who, while a student nurse in England, sent home samba albums which she'd received from a Brazilian pen pal. Kellman fell in love with the rhythms and this fueled his interest in other World Music forms. All this helped to shape his own music and writing which, while deeply rooted in Caribbean folk culture, contains echoes of the world as well. At eighteen Kellman left for Britain where he worked as a singer-songwriter playing pop and West Indian folk music on the pub and folk club circuit [3], and where he also engaged with the London literary scene mainly through the Poetry Society whose members met on Earls Court Square for wine and for sharing their creative works. There he met poets like Alan Brownjohn, Jamaican James Berry, and Peter Forbes, former editor of London’s Poetry Review.

Career

When Kellman returned to Barbados, he published two poetry chapbooks, In Depths of Burning Light (1982) and The Broken Sun (1984), which drew praise from Kamau Brathwaithe among others [3]. He worked as a newspaper reporter, a consumer magazine editor, and as Arts & Literature Review Columnist for The Bajan Magazine. Before immigrating to the U.S. in 1987, he also briefly worked in public relations, first at the Central Bank of Barbados and then at the National Cultural Foundation. His experiences at the Central Bank provided inspiration for his first novel The Coral Rooms (1994).

In 1987 he studied for a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. After completing in 1989 he moved to Augusta State University, Georgia, where he is Professor of Creative Writing. He was the longest-serving Director of Augusta State University's Sandhills Writers Conference (founded by the late Dr. Charles Willig in 1975) which he directed from 1989-2010 and which attracted major authors such as Ray Bradbury, Maxine Hong Kingston, Derek Walcott, Edward Albee, Gloria Naylor, and Rick Bragg, to name a few. He was the Founder-Director of the university's Winter Gathering of Writers (1990-2010), and is the Founder-Director of the Sandhills Writers Series held each Fall and Spring at the university. In 1992 he edited the first full-length U.S anthology of English-speaking Caribbean poetry, Crossing Water, and, in 1993, he became the first English-Speaking Caribbean writer to win a U.S.A National Endowment for the Arts literary award.

Kellman's creative and critical writing have been published in many anthologies and literary periodicals in the Caribbean, Latin America, the USA, England, Ireland, Canada,and India. In 1998, his theoretical essay on the poetic form he created called Tuk Verse was published in the London-based international magazine, Wasafiri. [2]

He finds considerable resonances between the Caribbean and the Southern states in the USA, which feed into his poetry, where blue jays, dogwoods and wisteria rub shoulders with angel fish, sugarcane and coral reefs. All his work has a powerful involvement with landscape, both as a living entity shaping peoples’ lives and as a source of metaphor for inner processes. The limestone caves of Barbados have provided a particularly fertile source of inspiration.[3]
Kellman's imagistic style (in his poems, novels, and songs) moves between the indigenous and the international, the concrete and the universal, the vernacular English and standard English, the personal and the public, and between the contemporary moment and the historical past. [3]

Publications

Watercourse, 1990 (poems)

Crossing Water: Contemporary Poetry of the English-Speaking Caribbean, Editor, 1992 (anthology)

The Coral Rooms, 1994 (novel)

The Long Gap, 1996 (poems)

Wings of a Stranger, 2000 (poems with companion music CD)

The Houses of Alphonso, 2004 (novel)

Limestone: An Epic Poem of Barbados (2008 with companion music CD)

Blood Mates, 2009 (music CD)

Come Again, 2011 (music CD)

Awards

1993 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship

1992 and 1994 Georgia Council for the Arts Individual artist awards

2007 Bell Research Award (Augusta State University)

Further Reading

Arnold, A. James. "Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows, Animal Tales and American Identities. Charlotteville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996. 204-229.

Best, Curwen, Roots to Popular Culture. London and Oxford: McMillan Education Ltd., 2001.

Black, Robyn Hood , '"Bringing islands to the Sandhills": The Coral Rooms'. Metropolitan Spirit, 1990.

Chamberlain, J. Edward, Come Back to Me, My Language. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 254-255.

Clarke, Robert, 'Anthony Kellman: Wings of a Stranger' (musical CD). Caribbean Beat, 2000.

Gilmore, John, 'Rock of Ages,' Caribbean Writer, 2008.

Harkins-Pierre, Patricia, Anthony Kellman, The Long Gap. The Caribbean Writer vol. 12 Summer 1998.

Jardim, Keith, 'Kellman - spirit of Caribbean landscape: The Coral Rooms'. Trinidad Guardian (February 19, 1995).

Kellman, Anthony, 'The revisionary interior image: A Caribbean author explores his work'. Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXV1, No 2. Atlanta: Georgia State University, 1993.

Kellman, Anthony, 'Tuk Verse and the Monomythical Folk Tradition.' Wasafiri,Volume 14, Issue 28, 1998. 39-42.

Persaud, Sasenarine, 'Anthony Kellman: The Coral Rooms'. World Literature Today, Summer 1995.

Rody, Caroline., The Daughter's Return. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2001. 111.118.

Sumereau, J. Edward , Limestone: An Epic Poem of Barbados. Metro Spirit, Issue #20.14. 2008.

Woodward, Angus , 'Watercourse' Northwest Review, 1991.

See also

• Caribbean literature
• Caribbean poetry
  Caribbean poetry
  Caribbean poetry is any form of poem, rhyme, or song that gets its derivatives from the Caribbean. This type of media became popular primarily in the early 1900s with the works of poets Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kamau Brathwaite, and Derek Walcott.-Origins:...
  
  
• List of Caribbean music genres
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Barbados

External links

• http://www.sandhills.aug.edu
• http://cropoverbarbados.com/anthony-kellman-crop-over-read