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18th Annual Louise Bennett-Coverley Reading Festival

Ancestral Voices: Awakening our Consciousness

Ancestral Voices: Awakening our Consciousness – Bedward & Garvey: Kei Miller, Geoffrey Philp, Sophia Nicholson, Maxine Osbourne with the Ring Ding Kids, and the Tallawah Mento Band

Join Southwest Regional Library with The Louise Bennett-Coverley Heritage Council for the 18th Annual Reading Festival. The event titled “Ancestral Voices: Awakening Our Consciousness,” will feature guest presenters Professor Kei Miller- novelist, author, poet and essayist, speaking on Alexander Bedward and Garvey Scholar, Geoffrey Philp - poet and novelist, speaking on Marcus Garvey.

Professor Miller has done extensive research on Bedward as seen in his award-winning novel Augustown, an intriguing historical fiction which explores the cultural and social setting and values of Jamaica of the 1920s against the backdrop of a dynamic religious movement.  Guest presenter, Geoffery Philp, is in the forefront of the movement advocating for the posthumous pardon of Garvey, which was successfully completed January 19, 2025 by President Joe Biden. He has published several books on Garvey for adults and children and has presented extensively on Garvey’s life and times.

The Reading Festival will include performances by the Tallawah Mento Band and the Jamaican Folk Revue, mainstays of the event.  One mission of the Reading Festival is to educate young people in the Diaspora on the island’s rich cultural heritage, to this end, the Ring Ding kids, ages 6- 10, will present traditional ring games led by well known actress, Maxine Osbourne.  

Patrons who arrive early will receive gift packages of products from Benjamins, a Jamaican company which celebrated its 145th year of operating in Jamaica and where Marcus Garvey was employed in the printery in his early working life.

This event is sponsored by Friends of the Southwest Regional Library and Louise Bennett-Coverley Heritage Council.

Southwest Regional Library

Southwest Regional Library serves the cities of Pembroke Pines, Davie, Miramar, Southwest Ranches and the surrounding communities. The collection is large and diverse reflecting a vibrant, international population, with materials for all ages in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Hebrew and Russian. The lobby has terrazzo floor design that gives visitors the illusion of traversing the Everglades under a ceiling that shows the sky from an alligator’s underwater perspective. It is a joint use public library/high school media center created by Broward County and the City of Pembroke Pines, becoming the first partnership of its kind in South Florida.

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