Miami, Florida (April 9, 2008)—In celebration of Jamaica Awareness Week at the University of Miami, award winning Jamaican author, Geoffrey Philp, will reading from his most recently completed manuscript, Nearing Fifty. The program which begins at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, April 16, 2008, will be held at the Storm Surge Café, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124

"In many ways, this is a homecoming for me," said Philp, a graduate of the University of Miami's Creative Writing Department. "I gave my first reading at the University of Miami in 1980. At that time, I'd just published Exodus and Other Poems (University of the Virgin Islands), and I was really anxious about reading in front of my peers. Twenty-eight years later, I'm just as anxious about connecting with a younger audience."

Nearing Fifty explores contemporary issues such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the death of General Pinochet of Chile and extends the discourse on Caribbean identity with allusions to the work of poets such as Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Edward Baugh, and Mervyn Morris. The collection, an imaginative investigation of the Caribbean Diaspora, also uses the archetypal stories from the Bible and Yoruba mythology, to explore the historical and cultural links among the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries.