(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.

At present, I work in the Department of Literatures, Cultural, and Communication Studies at The University of the West Indies-St. Augustine. I think, talk, tweet, and write about Caribbean Rhetoric. I’m the author of TROPIC TENDENCIES: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), which takes a theoretical look at the subject. I’m also the author and photographer of the award-winning book HIGH MAS: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Photography (University Press of Mississippi, 2018), which too the Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in 2019. I’m the co-founder of the Caribbean Memory Project, a Digital Humanities research project. There are a number of other DH projects that you can browse by clicking on the menu to your left.

Suffice it to say that 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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