UVI's Caribbean Writer announces annual literary prize winners

The Caribbean Writer announces its Volume 38 edition winners including The Daily News Prize for Prose or Fiction by a resident in the U.S. Virgin Islands or the British Virgin Islands.

That award went to Maria Elizabeth Ausherman for the essay “Wallace Williams: A Reflection.” Williams, a V.I. Olympian, is a retired territorial librarian under the Department of Planning and Natural Resources’ Division of Libraries and Archives. According to the statement, the award is a long-standing prize sponsored by the Virgin Islands Daily News for over two decades.

The other winners: Jean Ross Laguna is the winner of the Marvin E. Williams Literary Prize for a new or emerging writer. She was selected for her poem, “A New World Order.” This prize is sponsored by Dasil Williams, wife of the late Marvin Williams, who was the former editor (2002 to 2008) of The Caribbean Writer.

The Vincent Cooper Literary Prize winner is Caleb Dro for his poem “If There is Psalt After Death.” The prize is awarded to a Caribbean author for exemplary writing in the Caribbean Nation Language (a term used by Kamau Brathwaite, a celebrated post-colonial Caribbean author, to describe the vernacular language born in the Caribbean). This prize is sponsored by University of the Virgin Islands professor Vincent Cooper, a long-standing member of TCW’s board of editors, himself a Rhodes Scholar, author and poet.