Westfield State Professor of English Carol Bailey, Ph.D., has been appointed vice president of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS).
Founded in 1994, ACWWS celebrates and circulates the literature, orature, and multidisciplinary research about Caribbean women, gender, and sexuality. The organization also provides a forum for critical examinations of this body of work, increases awareness of the Caribbean diaspora, and fosters a climate of cooperation among all Caribbean linguistic and cultural groups.
This foundation’s creation was sparked by the 1988 Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars conference organized by Prof. Selwyn Cudjoe (then of Wellesley College), and thereby advanced creative writing and critical work by and about Caribbean women.
Bailey received her doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and currently teaches world, postcolonial, Caribbean, cross-cultural, and women’s literature at Westfield State. She is also the founding director for the University’s Diversity Across the Curriculum, which addresses ongoing social issues in academic pursuits.
She authored A Poetics of Performance: The Oral-Scribal Aesthetic in Anglophone Caribbean Fiction (UWI Press, 2014) and served as co-editor of the forthcoming Pamela Mordecai’s Selected Poems.
Her latest research and teachings focus on the intersections between colonization and globalization, highlighting how these phenomena manifest in cities — particularly Black diasporic cities. Bailey is currently working on her recent book project, Writing the Black Diasporic City in the Age of Globalization, which reflects this.
Carol and husband Errold were featured in the Spring 2014 issue of Focus magazine.