Bridget Jones Award winners 2024
This year, we are delighted to announce two winners of the Bridget Jones Award, Joanne C. Hillhouse and Ubaldimir Guerra
Joanne C. Hillhouse
Joanne C. Hillhouse is a writer from Ottos, Antigua-Barbuda. She was named the Anthony N. Sabga Awards for Caribbean Excellence arts and letters laureate in 2023 and is currently (in 2024) serving as Intersect Antigua-Barbuda’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence. Her fictional publications include children’s picture books (With Grace, Lost! A Caribbean Sea Adventure, The Jungle Outside, and To be a Cheetah), a coming of age novella (The Boy from Willow Bend), a teen/young adult novel (Musical Youth), and adult contemporary books (Dancing Nude in the Moonlight and Oh Gad!). Her fiction has also been published in journals like Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, The Caribbean Writer, Adda, and BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, among others, and anthologies like New Daughters of Africa and its abridged German language edition Neue Tochter Afrikas, Pepperpot: Best New Stories of the Caribbean, and For Women: In Tribute to Nina Simone, among others. A Lit Hub article named her in 2018 as one of ’10 Female Caribbean Authors You Should Know (And Add To Your American Lit Syllabus)’. For more on Joanne, visit https://jhohadli.wordpress.com/
Ubaldimir Guerra
Ubaldimir Guerra is a poet and lecturer from Belize City. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Belize and Master of Arts degree in English with a concentration in Multicultural and Transnational Literature from East Carolina University. He works as a full-time lecturer of English and literature at the University of Belize. His poetry appears in the anthology Bookmarked: PREE New Caribbean Writing, PREE: Caribbean Writing, BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, Interviewing the Caribbean, Apalachee Review, Obsidian and Bent Pin Press. Ubaldimir was shortlisted for the Bocas Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2022, long listed for the Bocas Breakthrough Fellowships 2023/24 and won the Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2022. He is currently working on a collection of poems.