The Brooklyn-based Tropicalfete celebrated Caribbean American Heritage Month with its annual cultural reading program, according to the group’s St. Lucian-born founder and president, Alton Aimable.
Aimable told Caribbean Life over the weekend that the community was invited to join the organization as its interviewers explored the world through the eyes of various Caribbean authors.
To cultivate a love for reading and to encourage more support for Caribbean authors, he said the organization created a “Read a Book a Day Challenge.”
Aimable said the producers of the event recommended 60 books by Caribbean authors covering a wide variety, such as children, adult, and fiction and non-fiction books.
The list of books can be found at https://tropicalfete.com/readjune2020/
Aimable said board member Keran Deterville “did a live broadcast online to give readers some highlights of the books.”
He said Barnes and Noble has been Tropicalfete’s “loyal and trustworthy partners since 2012 for this fascinating program, ‘Authors Connecting.’”
Aimable said Amazon links were added to this year’s program.
“Tropicalfete is connecting with the authors and the audience remotely, and the readings and interviews will be streamed on multiple platforms online,” Aimable said. “This was an exciting adventure allowing the participants to meet the Caribbean authors first hand and ask them about the books they have written.”
He said Geltown with his puppets, Kamla Millwood, Tilsa Wright, Samuel Archer and Nandi B. Jacob did readings from their books, and were also interviewed.
Millwood, the founder and chief executive officer of her own publishing company, Palatial Publishing, LLC, urged anyone who wants to pursue their dreams to “never ever give up, and believe their dreams in order to achieve their dreams.
“We should not hold ourselves back, but we ought to be our biggest cheerleaders and know that adversity will come, but obstacles and challenges are to be faced and climbed over as mountains,” said Millwood, the author of a books series that includes “Peach in Paradise”, “Peaches Pet Pug Paulo”, “A Peach on the Beach”, “Peach’s Princess Party” and “Peach’s Passion for Fashion.”
Aimable said another author, Samuel Archer, was also highlighted.
Archer – an entrepreneur, producer, songwriter, singer and musician – publishes “Hybrid Executive: The New Terminology and Responsibilities of Today’s Indie Artists.”
“The book is a must have of all artists, because it teaches artists how to protect their music, forces artists to ask themselves the difficult questions, etc.,” Aimable said.
With the plight of nannies always going untold, Aimable said, thanks to author Nandi Jacob, “the trials and tribulations of nannies are spoken about in her novel ‘The True Nanny Diaries by Nandi Key’”.
Aimable said that, every last Sunday in June, for the past seven years, Tropicalfete has produced a Caribbean Cultural Showcase, with all the cultural disciplines taught at the organization.
This year, he said the organization continued with tradition and featured the Damage Band.
Aimable said the audience was “taken on a musical journey involving soca, reggae, zouk, kompa, calypso, jazz, dance-hall and hip-hop.”
He said Tropicalfete closed out Caribbean Heritage month with ventriloquist Geltown.
