T&T born US-based writer and Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor, Dr Joanne Kil­go­ur Dowdy, is due to re­lease yet an­oth­er book. Art­ful Sto­ries: The Teacher, the Stu­dent, and the Muse, is cur­rent­ly be­ing pre­pared for print­ing and will be re­leased by year's end from Pe­ter Lang Pub­lish­ers. It will be added to Kil­go­ur Dowdy's grow­ing body of pub­li­ca­tions in­clud­ing Read­ers of the Quilt, The Skin that We Speak (with Dr Lisa Del­pit, McArthur Ge­nius Fel­low), PhD Sto­ries: Con­ver­sa­tions With My Sis­ters, GED Sto­ries, Teach­ing Dra­ma in the Class­room and re­cent­ly In The Pub­lic Eye. The book fo­cus­es on the per­son­al nar­ra­tives of four black, male artists who teach in high­er ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions and per­form as pro­fes­sion­als in their field.

The artists are orig­i­nal­ly from Trinidad and have been work­ing as pro­fes­sion­als and teach­ers for more than 30 years. Their con­tri­bu­tions to the arts in the USA and Cana­da as dancer/chore­o­g­ra­ph­er, drama­tist/di­rec­tor, light­ing de­sign­er, and mu­si­cian/com­pos­er need to be doc­u­ment­ed as part of the his­to­ry of the im­por­tant role of im­mi­grant artists to the de­vel­op­ment of teach­ing prac­tices in high­er ed­u­ca­tion. Be­cause they are black, male and im­mi­grant, their work as cre­ative artists has not been con­sid­ered (or has been rel­e­gat­ed to the pe­riph­ery) in the tra­di­tion of teacher/per­former prac­tices. This is the first aca­d­e­m­ic project that looks at them as a "com­mu­ni­ty" of schol­ars work­ing across in­ter­na­tion­al bound­aries to en­hance lit­er­a­cy, as a com­mu­nica­tive art form, and to build lead­ers for the next gen­er­a­tion of artists.

The read­er comes away with in­sight, from these men's col­lec­tive per­spec­tive, in­to the art of stage and the­atre per­for­mance and pro­duc­tion. In his pre-pub­li­ca­tion re­view of the book Ter­rence Wen­dell Brath­waite, se­nior lec­tur­er/high­er ed­u­ca­tion man­ag­er of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Worces­ter, Unit­ed King­dom, said Kil­go­ur Dowdy has skill­ful­ly es­sayed an "un­bun­tu­gog­i­cal meet­ing place in the minds of the read­er where she com­pels us to in­ter­face chthon­ic folk­ways of sur­vival with Cal­iban rea­son­ing and the sci­en­tifici­tiy of high ed­u­ca­tion, through the prodi­gious life-views of four North Amer­i­can "for­eign-na­tives" who al­chemised their own styles of as­pi­ra­tion from the 'bel­ly' of An­til­lean Dra­ma & The­atre Arts to the ubiq­ui­tous world stage."

J Lee Greene, Emer­i­tus Prof of the De­part­ment of Eng­lish and Com­par­a­tive Lit­er­a­ture, Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na at Chapel Hill, said that in telling the sto­ries of the four black men, Kil­go­ur Dowdy was able to "tell a col­lec­tive sto­ry of a 'fam­i­ly' of artists in­te­gral to the pro­duc­tion of stage per­for­mances world­wide. "Read­ers in­ter­est­ed in im­mi­grant stud­ies will find that the in­di­vid­ual sto­ries of these four men shed sig­nif­i­cant light on how not just artists but oth­er im­mi­grants from the Caribbean re­main deeply root­ed in their na­tion­al cul­ture while suc­cess­ful­ly in­te­grat­ing in­to oth­er cul­tures in North Amer­i­ca and in Eu­rope." Kil­go­ur Dowdy saw the need to write Art­ful Sto­ries, she said, "There are works that look at an in­di­vid­ual in a par­tic­u­lar set­ting (like) Dr Derek Wal­cott, No­bel Prize Win­ner, or the po­et­ry of Ka­mau Braith­waite. But no book sets down the sto­ry as told by the artist him­self, who is work­ing in high­er ed­u­ca­tion in the USA or Cana­da and train­ing young peo­ple for their lead­er­ship roles in the de­vel­op­ment of their dis­ci­pline."