Come Sunday, June 5, 2016, Bookends, the weekly literary supplement of the Jamaica Observer, will kick off its inaugural reading event, The Summer of Stories.

“The Summer of Stories is expected to become an annual celebration of fiction and literary non-fiction,” said Sharon Leach, the magazine’s editor. “Looking ahead to Bookends’ 10th anniversary in October, we decided to create a signature event, a feast of literature with an international flavour, in which our readers can enjoy a wide cross-section of world-class writing from the region and beyond. These writers, among the best in their field, gladly agreed to participate, for which we are grateful.”

The event will see the magazine’s format slightly modified, during the months of June and July, with only prose being published from established writers on the pages. These stories signify either stand-alone shorts or excerpts from novels-in-progress. This year’s debut summer event will feature primarily women writers from the UK, the US, Canada, Haiti, Trinidad, Belize and the Dominican Republic. Monique Roffey, Naomi Jackson, Sharon Millar, Michele-Jessica Fievre, Angie Cruz, Nelly Rosario, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, Peta-Gaye Nash, Jacqueline Bishop, Kesha Peyrefitte and Rochelle Spencer are the writers on tap.

“We’re very excited about the Summer of Stories,” Leach said. “The long days of summer are a great time for indulging in the pleasure of reading, and we’ve always encouraged

Bookends readers to luxuriate in the activity, especially during this time of year.

“Instead of publishing a summer reading list this year, we thought we’d introduce Jamaican readers to some really fabulous women writers, many of them award winners, who they might not necessarily be familiar with, but should be. Their amazing stories tackle a range of topics, employ a variety of styles, and

Bookends readers will be the better for reading them, and subsequently investigating the various authors’ bodies of work, if they aren’t as yet familiar with them.”

Meanwhile, Leach will be the keynote speaker at a literary fund-raiser this June for the Lopez Island Resource Centre (LIFRC), located on Lopez Island in the northwest region of Washington state, USA.

Spokesperson for the event organisers, Kip Greenthal, said, “The mission for the LIFRC is to support and enhance the security, well-being and education and life success of children and families who live here. A variety of mentorship, mental health and educational programmes have been established to meet the needs of struggling parents and children on this island. In an effort to help support some of the programmes, the LIFRC hosts a ‘literary’ fund-raiser, whose proceeds are a significant part of the LIFRC budget. Over the years, I have chosen authors whose work I believe reflects our LIFRC mission.

“After reading some of her stories, I was stunned by Sharon’s literary talent. Stories help us understand each other and the world better. What an opportunity to bring her to Lopez! It will be an honour to have Sharon visit us from across the miles, and, through her magnificent story-telling, help us to broaden our understanding of the challenges in her part of the world. She can be a bridge to deepening our awareness from one culture to another.”

Leach will also be teaching a three-day short story workshop sponsored by the LIFRC, which “will make her talents available to those who cannot afford to attend the fund-raiser”, Greenthal noted. Additionally, she will conduct workshops at nearby Seattle’s famed Hugo House.

Guest authors who have participated in the literary fund-raiser on Lopez Island include poets Natalie Diaz and Roger Reeves, and novelists Ruth Ozeki, Sherman Alexie, Susanna Moore, and Brian Doyle, among others.

Leach will remain on Lopez Island for the entire month of June as a guest of LIFRC, which will afford her time and space to work on various literary projects.

Curation is a vital but often overlooked role in the art world. These art professionals are visual and spatial storytellers, charged with selecting a collection of artworks for a venue. Through their skill in selecting works for an exhibition, they communicate a narrative to the audience. Bookends recently caught up with Kat Anderson and Graeme Evelyn in London to discuss their role as co-curators of Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora. This major exhibition, taking place between June 25 and September 11, 2016 at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, will be a landmark showcase of Jamaican visual art – the first of its kind ever to be held outside of Jamaica.

You are both artists in your own right. How did you make that shift from “artist” to “curator” and what would you highlight as the main difference between these roles?

Kat Anderson (KA): I studied Fine Art at university and had a few artist commissions, but in recent years I have been working primarily as a creative producer and curator. I’ve worked at the Bristol City Museum, at the art galleries in Bristol as a junior curator and as the gallery manager of Centrespace. In these roles, I was involved in curating shows, but Jamaican Pulse is the first major exhibition that I have curated.

Graeme Evelyn (GE): I am both an artist and studio director, and I have curated and co-curated on many occasions, on a much smaller scale within group art exhibitions, open studio events and festivals. Like Kat, Jamaican Pulse represents the first major exhibition that I have curated. I would say that the major difference between being an artist and being a curator is that an artist creates artwork from an individual and unique perspective and interest, whereas a curator selects works from the artist from which to create a space and conversational theme that hopefully inspires dialogue between the audience and the artist’s artwork.

What is the most memorable project you’ve curated so far?

KA: One project that I am extremely proud to have produced was calledDown at the Bamboo Club. It was an ‘Abolition 200’ project for Picture This Moving Image in Bristol. Through the commission of artist films, public workshops and exhibitions the project examined Bristol’s involvement in the Slave Trade and its legacy to the city and the psychological impact on descendants of enslaved Africans. I worked with some really talented artists and the project generated some interesting intersections between art and the local community. Not only that, we got to work in some important historic sites in my hometown that I was not aware of, such as the John Wesley Chapel.

GE: For me it would be the Afrika Eye International Film Festival of 2012 at the Watershed Bristol. I selected Andy Mundy – Castle’s documentary

The Fade, which chronicled the lives of four barbers in Accra/Ghana, London, New York and Kingston Jamaica. I also includedLife and Debt – the seminal 2001 documentary film directed by Stephanie Black (inspired by the essayA Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid).Life and Debt examined the economic and social situation in Jamaica, and specifically the impact of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Globalisation policies. Lastly, I selected Jamaican film-maker Storm Saulter’s groundbreaking contemporary Jamaican cinematic feature,Better Mus’ Come, which details the deadly impact of partisan Jamaican politics during the Seaga/Manley era.

Kat, you live in Berlin and Graeme, you’re based in London, how did you both come up with the concept for Jamaican Pulse and decide to work together on this?

KA: Well, we know each other from Bristol. I grew up there and Graeme lived there for a number of years. I believe it was around the time that I was doing the Bamboo Club project when Graeme and I met. Graeme actually led a workshop for one of the projects. I started visiting him in his studio and we just began talking about art in Bristol, things we’d seen, things we’d not seen, discussing work we had an affinity with…

GE: Yes, Kat and I have been friends for some time now and have followed each other’s journey as second-generation Jamaicans in the British art world. We often hung out at my studio and discussed the under-representation of contemporary Caribbean artists in the UK and decided to take some action to rectify this missed opportunity. Jamaican Pulse is a timely intervention that hopefully can create an awareness of and an interest in the important voice of contemporary Jamaican and Diaspora art in the 21st century.

You mentioned that you are both second-generation Jamaicans. Do you think that your Jamaican heritage impacted the curatorial process?

GE: It certainly helped us to formulate the themes of the exhibition, as we were able to draw on direct experience from our parental and family heritage. This impacted the questions we posed to the artwork and to the artists themselves. Without familiarity with Jamaican culture, history and language, I believe it would have been very difficult to understand the subtleties of the important messages these artists convey.

KA: This exhibition comes from a very personal place and our heritage has very much been the driving force behind wanting to curate this show. As a second-generation Jamaican who has only ever been to Jamaica once before this project, the idea of seeking out work that I have a conceptual and cultural affinity with, but which also offers up very different geographic and life perspectives, was a real objective for me.

How did you select the venue for the show?

GE: When we started to devise this exhibition, Kat and I chose The Royal West of England Academy (RWA) as these galleries are arguably the most stunning large gallery spaces in the South West.

KA: There was also a bit of a challenge in this selection. We wanted to go to the most imposing art institution and see how far we could get with a proposal to show Jamaican contemporary visual art. We could think of nowhere more fitting of that description than the RWA, which is the oldest gallery in the city. It felt kind of austere, ‘private’ and, quite frankly, white! It was also aesthetically conservative in the exhibitions it had hosted, which made us even keener to infiltrate it with this exhibition in particular. We were interested in how we would be received and whether our concept would be accepted at all. Interestingly, it took four years to be approved. By that time, I’d done a Master of Arts degree and we had both moved to London. I was actually getting ready to relocate to Germany at the time when I received a call from Graeme saying they wanted us to do the show!

How did you select the artwork for the show and were there any specific criteria that you were looking for?

GE: The selection of the art for this exhibition began as an exploration of the contemporary artists that are currently working in and outside of Jamaica. We were very keen to promote emerging artists, rather than relying on the work of ‘established’ artists as the sole voice of contemporary art on the island.

KA: Rather than positing a theme to which these artists’ had to respond, it became a process of learning and constantly reassessing, as curators and second-generation Jamaicans, what are these artist interests? What does it mean to be Jamaican in the 21st century? Art and politics became the Jamaican Pulse central theme simply because we found that the artists selected wanted to contribute to their nation’s ongoing cultural evolution as social commentators and agitators, rather than to make art for art’s sake. There is a distinction between making art created from a position of privilege, and creating art as an agent of change.

How many artists did you want to include in the show and how did you decide who made the final cut?

GE: The number of artists wasn’t really a factor in determining who would make ‘the final cut’. It was more about whether the artists we met had a binding thread through which a theme could be developed amongst their works and practice. That theme became clear to us as politics.

KA: Yes, it was really more to do with bringing a group of artists together under a theme that we had come to through our research, as Graeme says, politics.

How important was the inclusion of artists from the Diaspora?

GE: It was of vital importance. The Jamaican Diaspora art community is very large, proactive and extensive. What we do hope this exhibition does produce is a renewed interest from institutional spaces and art collectors around the world in this burgeoning new interest in contemporary Caribbean voices based in the UK and beyond.

KA: I would say that the show was fairly evenly split between resident Jamaican and Jamaican Diaspora artists. What was great about this project was the opportunity to see and learn about the Jamaican Diaspora artists in North America.

Did you commission any works especially for this show?

KA: We commissioned a new performance piece by Lawrence Graham Brown, which will be performed at the opening weekend at the Arnolfini, Bristol. Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow will be restaging two performances called Crop Killa and Gypsies’ Picnic: The Veins of Oya was Always Here at different times and locations over the opening weekend, also.

GE: We also created three artist residencies, which will be in progress during the show’s run. The Bluecoat in Liverpool is working in collaboration with New Local Space in Jamaica. Two Kingston-based artists Leasho Johnson and Di-Andre C Davis will be involved in that. Paint Jamaica’s Matthew McCarthy will also be doing a residency at Easton Community Centre where he will work with a group of young people to develop a series of permanent murals. Kayle Brandon will do a drawing residency in and around St Paul’s, an important area of African-Caribbean heritage.

KA: During the exhibition run, there will be lots more artist events announced, both at the RWA and in other places in the city, so you can look out for more news on those.

What do you see as your mission as curators of this exhibition?

KA: Jamaican art is not just one thing; it has many forms, many themes. I suppose a large part of the mission is simply to showcase contemporary Jamaican art, as a show like this and on this scale hasn’t happened for a decade or so in the UK. We want the audience to gain a sense of the proliferation of diverse voices and talent in this collective of contemporary artists. I also want the audience to walk away from the show feeling like they have seen their own lives reflected in some way and that they can personally identify with some of the themes that these artists are concerned with. We are all political beings; we are affected by politics, and the way geopolitics is heading, our intersections become more frequent and proximity draws us even nearer.

GE: As curators we have a responsibility to the artists, their artwork and space for which the work is shown. In this case, we realise that an exhibition of this importance must have positive-value creative legacies for both the artists and for Jamaican art in the UK. We also hope to spark a renewed interest in Jamaican art, which will be sustained into the foreseeable future.

Jamaican Pulse: Art & Politics from the Jamaican Diaspora, 25 June – 11 September 2016, at the Royal West of England Academy

Andrea Dempster-Chung is an engineer and serial entrepreneur. She is the founder of Go Global Art (www.goglobalart.com), an online platform where people purchase art directly from artists who live in different countries around the world. She has a keen interest in projects that boost the creative economy and benefit artists.