The Dead Stay Close: Grief, Ghosts & Caribbean Memory – Fiction & Poetry

In Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, a Haitian American mother in Miami survives a shooting and keeps the experience from her family, setting in motion a reckoning with grief, home, and the relationships she depends on. Carol Mitchell’s A Good Haunting: Stories draws on Caribbean ghosts and folklore to explore motherhood, betrayal, death, and the ties that persist between the living and the dead. In Sturge Town: Poems, Kwame Dawes returns to his family’s ancestral home in Jamaica, tracing connections among place, migration, mortality, and spiritual inheritance. Donna Aza Weir-Soley’s Love in a Season of Dying considers intimate and familial losses alongside estrangement, forgiveness, and the endurance of Caribbean women. Together, these writers explore how the dead remain present in stories, memories, and daily life, and how writing gives shape to experiences of mourning across the Caribbean and its diaspora. Moderated by Kelly Baker Josephs, author, editor, and professor at University of Miami, whose research examines Caribbean mourning and commemoration in digital spaces. Buy ( https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9780593803523 )Dèy Buy ( https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9781636143132…