Read Sonia’s reflections on her 2017 Summer Fellowship with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio at the University of Iowa, in which she considers jump-starting a podcast for Caribbean voices:

“I’ve been called a “luddite” for over a decade, mostly by myself to pre-empt the comment from others. It’s for good reason—I do, after all, make books by hand. In fact, at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, in which I am an MFA candidate for Book Arts, I make them from scratch: writing my own work, forming sheets of paper, setting and printing movable type, and binding them all into a final book object with thread and needle, and perhaps some glue. So how could I find a foothold for the Digital Scholarship and Publication Studio Summer Fellowship?

It’s true that I am not the most comfortable with technology. Do you know that my parents run the leading computer technology store in my home of Nassau, The Bahamas? Let’s just say the apple fell far, far away from that tree. But through my work at the UICB, I have gained a deeper understanding of how these crafts have shaped our digital world—even just considering the rich depth of book and type history in contemporary digital design language, these disparate realities intersect more than we think. Now more than ever, I’ve been contemplating how to use digital spaces to advance or re-examine or share literature…”

Read more here and here.