- Yashika Graham, Poet
Yashika Graham is a Jamaican writer, visual artist and broadcaster. She is the 2019 recipient of the Mervyn Morris Prize for poetry from the University of the West Indies (UWI) where she read for a BA in Literatures in English.
She is an executive member of the Poetry Society of Jamaica and has won numerous prizes, awards, and fellowships. In 2016 she won the Noteworthy Writer Award from the Jamaica Creative Writing Competition for her poem “Time Travel” for which she released a 2017 short film following the release of her 2016 short film “Directions from the Border.” She won the 2018 and 2019 Poetry Clash Competitions at the UWI. Graham received a 2018 Centrum Writers’ Residency and 2019 Urban Wilderness Project Research and Teaching Fellowship. She has been widely anthologized in journals and magazines including The Caribbean Writer, Susumba’s Bookbag, POUi, Spillway magazine, PREE Lit, Moko magazine, Jamaica Journal, Magma 76 and Cordite Review 81: New Caribbean Writing, selected by Vladimir Lucien.
Graham has read her work, given lectures, and taught cross-genre workshops internationally including for the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference in Washington, USA. She was a 2023 fellow of the University of Iowa International Writing Program and in 2024 she self-published the chapbook My Mother is a Bushwoman. Some of Us Can Go Back Home, published by Blouse & Skirt Books, is her debut collection.