On Thursday, June 23, 2022, at 6:30 PM, Saint Lucian writer, actor, and critic Vladimir Lucien will read selections from his first collection of poetry, Sounding Ground, as part of several activities organized by the Consulate General of Saint Lucia in New York to commemorate Caribbean Heritage Month in the United States.
The event dubbed Ground’s Grace: Roots and Poems, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the Saint Lucia House, 438 East 49th Street, in Brooklyn (between Church and Snyder Avenues).
His reading will be preceded by a reading by Jamaican poet Chenée Daley, after which Mr. Lucien will read, followed by a conversation between the two poets.
Lucien’s work has been published in The Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, The PN Review, BIM magazine, Washington Square Review, VOGUE, Caribbean Beat, and elsewhere.
Sounding Ground was first published in May 2014, and was subsequently shortlisted for the Guyana Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2015. The collection was the overall winner of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize making Lucien the youngest ever to win the prize.
Lucien has been featured at numerous regional and international festivals, including the Calabash International Literary Festival, the Read My World Festival in Amsterdam, the Jaipur Literary Festival, the Brooklyn Book Fair, the Miami Book Fair, and at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. CBC books in Canada hailed Lucien a “young black writer to watch”, while eminent Caribbean poet and cultural theorist, Kamau Brathwaite hailed Lucien’s work as signaling the start of a new tradition in the Anglophone Caribbean.
A former lecturer at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, he is presently a PhD candidate at New York University.