Who We Are
RWL is a Caribbean feminist literary salon, community library, and reading community founded in Jamaica in 2017.
We read literature that takes the lives of women, queer people, and historically marginalised communities seriously as the centre. Caribbean writing is our spine. The diaspora, the region, and the scholars and storytellers who have been building this intellectual tradition for generations are who we return to, season after season.
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Our year moves in four seasons, each built around a central question and an anchor text. We begin each season with a free Opening, an evening in the library among the books, and close it with a paid Salon where the reading becomes conversation.
Each season has a reading list: novels, poetry, theory, film, art, and podcast recommendations that let you move through the question from every angle. At the Salon, each attendee receives a physical copy of The Verandah Post, our seasonal newsletter featuring commissioned essays from Caribbean writers, academics, and thinkers.
The library is open year-round for borrowing across Jamaica.
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Literature is not a luxury.
The Caribbean has produced some of the most rigorous and beautiful thinking in the world, and that thinking deserves a dedicated room. That the act of reading carefully, slowly, in disagreement is itself political.
We are not neutral. We are curious, rigorous, and committed to the writers and ideas that refuse to be tidy.
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The RWL community library holds fiction, poetry, theory, memoir, and scholarship- much of it Caribbean, all of it chosen with intention. It is free to borrow from. Patrons who support the library quarterly borrow more and attend the salons for free.
Founded by Jherane Patmore. Based in Manchester, Jamaica. mail@rebelwomenlit.com