Tiphanie Yanique kicks off her first book tour at Mead Hall.
By Samantha Pritchard C’10
If you’d had your eyes closed, you wouldn’t have known it was Assistant Professor of English Tiphanie Yanique up at the podium at the English department’s Writers at Drew event this spring. A native of St. Thomas, Yanique gave a captivating reading in the Caribbean patois of one of her characters, Slick, a St. Croix drug dealer smitten with a woman home from an American college. The story is from How to Escape from a Leper Colony, Yanique’s highly regarded debut collection of short stories exploring identity across cultures. Writing in The Boston Globe, novelist Margot Livesey had this to say: “I reached the end of [the book] with the exhilarating sense that I had been on the best kind of journey—not, finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.”