(pron. kee-vin; no accent, no apostrophe, no space)

My name is Kevin Adonis Browne. I am an essayist, poet, photographer, teacher, lover, friend. I’ve been called a deep limer, a term I like very much. I dance (poorly), and I archive. Layla and Kyle are my children, and they know me.

I am a Trini man.
A Caribbean man.
An American man.
An academic immigrant.
A doer of things.

I’m Professor of Rhetoric and Writing in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University. I think, talk, tweet, and write about Caribbean Rhetoric. I’m the author of three books on the topic: My latest is A SENSE OF ARRIVAL (Duke, 2025), preceded by HIGH MAS: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Photography (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), which won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in 2019, and TROPIC TENDENCIES: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). I’m also the creator of The No Words Project, published in 2021. There are a number of other DH projects that you can browse by clicking on the menu to your left.

I do these things because I have an insatiable and inexplicable need to understand my people and—having understood—advocate for them from the vantage point of evolving clarity and a half-negotiated exile.

In spite of the autonomy I crave, I am driven by things.

Spirits.
Histories.
Languages.
Archives.
Futures.

Some definable idea of my origins and the potential of that idea to make a difference (such that my conversations always seem to have a similar refrain, like a lavway). I am driven by the sublime dynamics of vernacular life—the everyday. There are other things I’d rather do from time to time, but they’re mostly imagined in the context of this pursuit of deep rhetorical understanding and the desire for what I might consider the extensive poetics of a meaningful life.

It’s a privilege and a challenge that I continue to embrace.

Welcome.

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