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The Ghosts contains two short stories by Kia Penso. The first story, A Ghost, recalls her childhood in Jamaica and the dynamics of the relationship between her grandmother, Mumsy, and other members of the family. In the second story, The Pirate Rackham, the narrator returns home for a trip on her father’s sailboat, exploring the coastline of Jamaica like she did with him many times in her youth. Caroline Allen created collages using images inspired by the stories, research into Caribbean flora and fauna, and conversations with Penso. Allen’s collages were used to design multi-colored linocuts carved and printed by Jeff Abshear.

Kia Penso is a compulsive reader and writer. She grew up in Jamaica, where the landscape was nothing like the places in most of the books, but she loved it and the books anyway. She earned a PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She taught at Grinnell College before moving away from academic life to work as a journalist, technical writer, and editor, while pursuing her personal creative work. Her current project is a collection of short stories and essays that, “range in topics among Greek myth, English novels and poetry, Jean Rhys, African American gospel music, calypso, and my own personal Caribbean history, which is in some ways very typical of the newness and strangeness of the history that I examine in these literary works.”

Caroline Allen taught as a Lecturer in Literature and Writing at the College of Creative Studies (CCS) at UC Santa Barbara for over three decades, while also pursuing her work as a visual artist. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Santa Barbara Independent, Juxtapose Literary Magazine, Solo Novo, and Mary, and she has work in the collections of Santa Barbara and Ventura County. As an artist she works in a variety of media including painting, printmaking, ceramics, and collage. Her most recent project was a collaboration with the writer Kay Young on an illustrated book entitled We’ve Never Been So Unannoyed: Iceland for the Lady Traveler.

This project was funded by an Arts Project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This book was printed from hand-set Bembo type on Flurry cotton paper with a Vandercook Universal III press in an edition of 45 copies (12 hard cover casebound books, 33 soft folded paper cover).

Hard cover casebound books: $475
Soft folded paper cover: $250
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