Jamaican Writer’s Book Launch – Snapshots from Istanbul

Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Ms. Bishop spent her childhood between the capital city and the rural community of Nonsuch in parish of Portland .  An alumna of Holy Childhood High School, after migrating to the United States, she obtained degrees in psychology and writing from at Lehman College – City University of New York and New York University, respectively.  In addition to her recently concluded Fulbright scholarship stint to Morocco, Jacqueline has also studied at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, and L’Université de Paris, France.  She is also the recipient of the James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship to the University of Miami, where she studied poetry under noted Jamaican writer, Lorna Goodison.  A critically acclaimed multi talented artist, Ms. Bishop is also painter and filmmaker, and the founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts & Letters. rs.

Following her very well-received Fauna, Jacqueline Bishop’s Snapshots from Istanbul is another leap forward in terms of developing an assured signature voice and extending the range of her subject matter.  At the heart of the collection is a sequence of powerfully sensuous poems about a doomed relationship in Istanbul, touching in its honesty and, as in the best poems about other places, vivid in its portrayal of the otherness, highly conscious of the layers of difference, and aware that the poems’ true subject is the uprooted self. Here, inevitably, Bishop is forced to think about her Americanness and her Jamaicanness in different ways. 

St Francis College – Callahan Center 
182 Remsen Street
(between Clinton & Court Sts)
Downtown Brooklyn, NY