Colin Channer

Novelist Colin Channer is the father of two children in addition to being a troublemaker, the founder and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is also chairman of the festival’s board of trustees.

His many works of fiction include the story collection Passing Through, the novella The Girl With the Golden Shoes, and novel Waiting In Vain, a 1998 Critic’s Choice selection of the Washington Post. He is the editor of the fiction anthology Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction from Jamaica’s Calabash Writer’s Workshop and the co-editor with Kwame Dawes of the poetry anthology So Much Things to Say: Over 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival. His honors include the appointment as the 2008-2011 Susan and Donald Newhouse Professor in Creative Writing at Wellesley College near Boston, MA and the 2010 Silver Musgrave Medal for Achievement in Literature. His essays and criticism have appeared in among other places, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement.