agymah

Welcome to my supplementary website (my official site is hopelessly outdated).

I was born in Barbados. Bajan born and bred, as the saying goes. From there I migrated to the USA to pursue my studies at Baruch College, City University of New York where I earned first a bachelors degree in finance and later a masters degree in quantitative economics.

My first full-time jobs after graduation were anything but creative: research assistant at the United Nations Secretariat, statistician at the New York City Department of Investigations, and senior economist for three very long years at the New York State Department of Taxation & Finance in Albany, New York.

That, in a nutshell, is my past life (at least the wage-earning side of it). No need to dwell on it any further. I laid it to rest when I entered the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University to study under the apprenticeship of Paule Marshall.

My first novel, Flickering Shadows (Coffee House Press, 1996), began as a short story in one of Paule Marshall’s workshops, was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award and was listed among the Library Journal’s top 20 first novels of 1996.

My second novel, Pictures of a Dying Man (Coffee House Press, 1999), was listed among the Village Voice’s best 25 books of 1999, won the Commonwealth of Virginia/Library of Virginia Literary Award (2000), ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award (2000), was a finalist and received honorable mention for the Gustavus Myers Book Award, and was nominated for the Commonwealth of Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts 2000.

Other awards I’ve received include the Whiting Writers Award in 2003 and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Alumnus of the Year Award in 2004.

The manuscript of my third novel... Well, let's put it this way: the way I feel about publishers right now mirrors Grans opinions about politicians, lawyers, doctors and the like (see Recently Published link).

But as the saying goes, life goes on. So, even as other characters, their idiosyncrasies and mischiefs float around inside my head I labour on my fourth manuscript, if for no other reason than to preserve the vestiges of my sanity.

That, in brief, is who am.

In Their Own Words

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

- African proverb.

"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."

- Ralph Ellison

"Keep on writing, no matter what! That's the most important thing. As long as you have a job on hand that absorbs all your mental energy, you haven't much worry to spare over other things. It serves as a suit of armor."

- Eugene O’Neill, playwright

"There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.' In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things—read and write—and wait."

- Countee Cullen.

Style...is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament.... Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it —whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.'

- On the Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

I write to be read. I re-write to be re-read.

- Andre Gide

"Artists are here to disturb the peace."

- James Baldwin

"I really don't think there is very much honor in a life devoted to writing, unless that writing can do something awfully unusual, awfully necessary."

-Wallace Shawn, playwright

"Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights."

- Georg Hegel

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory."
- Friedrich Engels

"I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death. You can't use Jane Austen to speak about African reality. Which brings the question: what is reality? Everyone's reality is different."

- Ben Okri

"I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk."

- Philip Roth

"I'm glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Eurocentered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got. It's almost impossible for anyone in the West not to see the West as the God-given gift to the world."
- Doris Lessing

Life is what happens to you
While you're busy making other plans
- John Lennon

“A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty."

- Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West.