Discipline: Literature

Wayne Brown

Discipline: Literature
Region: Trinidad, WEST INDIES
MacDowell Fellowships: 1993
Wayne Vincent Brown (1944-2009) was a columnist, poet, and fiction writer, and a teacher and mentor to numerous Caribbean writers. Brown was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His grandfather was Vincent Brown, the Attorney-General of Trinidad and Tobago. His mother died soon after giving birth to him, and for most of his childhood Wayne was brought up by relatives, while his father worked as a puisne judge. Brown had been a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S., Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds from 1974 to 1977, and a Fellow of Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He also attended the International Writing Program at University of Iowa and is the founder of the Observer Creative Writing Workshop. Most recently, he was an instructor at Lesley University's M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program. He was the author of On the Coast, for which he was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1973. His works also include Landscape with Heron (2000), Edna Manley: The Private Years (1976), Voyages (1989), and The Child of the Sea (1990). He also edited Selected Poetry and Bearing Witness: The Best of the Observer Arts Magazine 2000. He founded Observer Literary Arts magazine that spawned a new generation of Caribbean writers, and wrote a weekly column for The Jamaica Observer entitled "In Our Time." The column also appeared in the Trinidad and Tobago Express, as well as in the Guyanese press. His final writing engagement had been a weekly column, "In the Obama Era", for the Express, the Barbados Daily Nation, and Guyana's Stabroek News. One of Brown's most memorable poems, "Noah," retells the Genesis story in symbolic terms. The ark filled with animals is "his mind's ark," the ship and its occupants "[b]eat and beat across the same sea / Bloated, adrift, finding / Nothing to fasten to." And by poem's end "Noah, released,/ Turned once more outwards, giving thanks. / Relief dazed them: nobody realized / Nothing had changed."

Studios

New Hampshire

Wayne Brown worked in the New Hampshire studio.

New Hampshire Studio, originally named Peterborough Studio, was given to MacDowell by Mr. and Mrs. William Schofield, Mrs. H. A. Chamberlain, Mrs. Andrew Draper, and Miss Ruth Cheney. The studio was renamed in 1943. The Gilbert Verney Foundation established an endowed maintenance fund in 1990, and a bequest in memory of MacDowell Fellow Victor Candell underwrote the…

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