May 7, 2025
The Center for Fiction is thrilled to have welcomed Marcia Douglas for a conversation about The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, a new novel continuing the “speculative ancestral project” she started in 2018 with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. She was joined in conversation by Ken Chen, Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College of Columbia University.
Douglas’s latest book dives back into her mythical reworking of Rasta history with a mosaic of characters seeking something or someone lost: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space, an undocumented migrant worker struggles with loss while living in the U.S.; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself.
Enjoy a riveting reading and conversation about Douglas’s poetic, eco-spiritual novel, and the work of cultural preservation through literature.
Featured Book
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The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive
By Marcia Douglas
Published by New Directions
Zooming into tight focus on present-day life and dashing deep into the past in turns, the pace is fast and fierce in The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, which continues Marcia Douglas’s “speculative ancestral project” (The Whiting Foundation) begun with The Marvellous Equations of the Dread. Her new poetic and eco-spiritual book carries further the cultural preservation so central to Douglas’ vision. The Shante Dream Arkive brings alive a mosaic of characters—all searching through history for something or someone lost to the island: a mother searches for her missing child through time and space; an undocumented migrant’s struggles with loss while living in the US; a youth wanders through dream-gates seeking liberation and the lost parts of himself. And one key to the whole is Zora Neale Hurston’s left-behind camera. Each chapter/poem opens like an aperture onto another aspect of the dream story. And, each and every potent dream story contains the spirit, beauty, and riddim of Jamaica:
For after three hundred years of slaughter, monk seals know better than to reveal themselves to humans. These days, they stay low, adapting to below surface conditions and establishing habitat with the underwater spirits of drowned horses and slaves disappeared overboard. For things happen below sea that have never been told. There is wheelin there and turnin; and far-far down past brochure azure, cerulean and indigo, there is a vast dark ink and vortices of voices caught up in such a trumpet of rah- &-glory bottomsea sound as to move earth’s axis. And after that, more ink blue, and cobalt and sapphire and a calm-calm wata— velvet and kin to the moon brand new. The monk seals dare not go this far. But the spirits do.
In Conversation
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Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas was born in the U.K., and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica. The author of novels, poems, and essays, she is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The Marvellous Equations of the Dread was longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Photo Credit: Hardy Klahold
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Ken Chen
Ken Chen
Ken Chen is an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College of Columbia University. He is currently working on his next book, tentatively titled Death Star, which follows his journey to the underworld to rescue his father and his encounters there with those destroyed by colonialism. His poetry collection, Juvenilia, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Louise Glück, who wrote, “Like only the best poets, Ken Chen makes with his voice a new category.”
