Trinidad and Tobago-born USA-based author and academic Elizabeth Nunez passed away in New York, USA on Monday, November 11, 2024.
Elizabeth Nunez, born in Cocorite, Trinidad, on February 18, 1944, began writing as early as nine years of age and won the first-place prize for the “Tiny Tots” writing contest in the Trinidad Guardian.
She emigrated from Trinidad to the United States after completing high school at the age of 19 in 1963. While in the USA, she earned a BA in English from Marian College in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and an MA and PhD in Literature from New York University. She began teaching at Medgar Evers College in 1972, a year after the college was established and was instrumental in developing its writing curriculum. She was a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where she taught courses on Caribbean Women Writers and Creative Writing when she passed away.
Apart from her teaching, she was the author of When Rocks Dance (1986), Beyond the Limbo Silence (1998), Bruised Hibiscus (2000), Discretion (2002), Grace (2003), Prospero’s Daughter (2006), Anna In Between (2010), Boundaries (2011), Not for Everyday Use (2014), Even in Paradise (2016), and Now Lila Knows (2022). Part of her memoir “Discovering My Mother” was published in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa edited by Margaret Busby.
Some awards she won for her work were The New York Times Editors’ Choice and 2006 Novel of the Year from Black Issues Book Review for Prospero’s Daughter. Bruised Hibiscus won the 2001 American Book Award, and Beyond the Limbo Silence won the 1999 Independent Publishers Book Award. In addition, Nunez was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Discretion; Boundaries was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice and nominated for a 2012 NAACP Image Award; and Anna In-Between was chosen for the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence as well as a New York Times Editors’ Choice and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.
She co-founded the National Black Writers Conference, which received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Reed Foundation under her direction as its co-director from 1986 to 2000. Nunez also hosts a radio program on WBAI 99.5FM and is chair of the PEN/Open Book Committee. She was the executive producer of the 2004 Emmy-nominated television series Black Writers in America.
The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival Literary Awards, the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean and the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers Prize, named in her honour are awarded annually to enhance the visibility of Caribbean and diaspora authors and connect them to larger literary networks and resources.
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