Product details
- ISBN 9780826500533
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The story of Afro-Caribbean poet Norberto James Rawlings is one of migration, loss, adaptation, and reinvention that goes back for generations. Most well-known for “The Immigrants,” a poem about a Black minority community of Anglophone sugar plantation workers, James Rawlings’s poetry has been performed, monumentalized, and celebrated in the Dominican Republic and beyond. Over time his work transcended the acclaim of his most famous poem, offering expansive reflections on the world outside the island of his birth, expressed with an expatriate’s longing. Bringing this selection of James Rawlings’s work into English for the first time, this volume will expand the entry points into one of the most important Caribbean writers yet to punctuate the mainstream.
Norberto Pedro James Rawlings (1945–2021) was a poet of Afro-Caribbean descent from the Dominican Republic. In the 1960s, he moved to Santo Domingo to finish high school until he was expelled for his political activities. Soon after, he joined the rebel forces at the age of nineteen as civil war broke out in the Dominican Republic. His growing political militancy sent him into political exile under the guise of foreign study at the University of Havana, Cuba, where he earned his Licenciatura in Language and Literature. Eager to continue his studies, he earned a doctoral degree at Boston University in 1992. His first book of poetry, Sobre la marcha (1969), contains one of the most iconic Dominican poems of the twentieth century, “The Immigrants.” Other collections of his poetry published throughout his career include La provincia sublevada (1972), Vivir (1981), La urdimbre del silencio (2000), Patria portátil (2004), and Oscuro amor (2010).
Elizabeth C. Wellington is the official translator for two prominent Dominican writers, René del Risco Bermúdez and Norberto James Rawlings. She has contributed essays, stories, and poetry translations to numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Breadloaf Quarterly, The Literary Olympians, and The United Nations Society of Writers. She received the Robert Fitzgerald Literary Translation Prize from Boston University. She manages the archives of Norberto James Rawlings and honors translation requests of his work.
