In this talk, Sonia Farmer dives into an overlooked environmental atrocity: the 1923 removal of 40 tonnes of coral from the Andros Great Barrier Reef by filmmaker Ernest Williamson and Roy W. Miner of the American Museum of Natural History. Using archival materials—memoirs, articles, correspondence, and ephemera—Sonia traced the motivations behind this act and reframed it in the context of today’s coral extinction crisis. This talk was originally streamed Thursday, 19 June.
About the artist
Sonia Farmer is a writer, visual artist, small press publisher, and educator who uses the form of the book and its allied crafts to expand Caribbean narratives from within its geographical space. She is the founder of Poinciana Paper Press, a center for book arts, writing, and publishing, located in Nassau, The Bahamas, that is dedicated to empowering the diversity of narratives in Caribbean art & literature. She is the author of Infidelities (Poinciana Paper Press, 2017) which was longlisted for the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, as well as the artist book A True & Exact History (Poinciana Paper Press, 2018) which won the 2019 Holle Award for Excellence in Book Arts. Her poetry has won the 2011 Prize in the Small Axe Literary Competition, been shortlisted for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and has appeared in various journals and self-published limited-edition chapbooks. She holds a BFA in Writing from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa.