Yvonne Weekes has always been a capable poet, but in Living Stone she fully claims her project and her power. These are generous poems that refuse to withhold their metaphors from the reader. They not only observe a world of race and gender, of class and faith, that stretch between England, Montserrat, and Barbados, they sing that world and pray it into tenderness.
- Professor Kei Miller FRSI, an award-winning Jamaican poet, novelist, and essayist.
Living Stone is chilling and charming, sobering and refreshing. There's the carnivalesque as an answer to botheration and danger all around, and there's hope, after all. With a literary voice fusing the spoken and the scribal, Weekes offers insight into multi-layered Caribbean reality, where "There is a tourist sea and then there is our sea." Living Stone is also a poetic account of violence against women, of social decorum (as a buttress and as a burden), of embodied spiritual ideas, of ancestral memories, and of the painfully personal that is justifiably made public.
A timely book by the author of the critically acclaimed Volcano: A Memoir.
- Bartosz Wójcik, a Polish literary critic and a translator specialising in the cultures of the Caribbean.
Living Stone is an emancipational journey through three sonic movements of finely crafted poems. The collection is a grieving, a fear-facing remembering, a (re)sounding unsilencing, an emotional, untethered truth-telling; a courageous rolling away of various 'stones', chasing off jumbies and clearing webs, reminding us to reclaim and resurrect ourselves from past events, heal stone(d) hearts, so when death does eventually find us, we are living, full-filled, present and free.
- Celia A. Sorhaindo, author of Guabancex is a Dominican poet.
Living Stone is a powerful collection of poems which questions what it means to live as a poet, in the poem, and outside it, in a world of thick fact and even thicker memories. For Yvonne Weekes, although poetry promises some solace, it cannot quench the accumulation of daily dreams and griefs, or the inevitable sedimentation of desires and sorrows.
- Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón, Puerto Rican author, translator, editor.
Dr Yvonne Weekes is a Writer, Arts Educator, Theatre Director and Academic. The current Chair of the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, Weekes won first prize in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2005 (Barbados) for her memoir Volcano which chronicles her experience with the Montserrat volcanic crisis and later published by Peepal Tree Press in Leeds. She has had poems, stories, essays, and academic articles published in over 20 anthologies and journals. Her books include Nomad - a collection of poems (House of Nehesi/HNP) and Pandemic Moments -a poetry collection co-authored with the late Professor Howard Fergus (Fergus Publishing). She is a co-editor of Disaster Matters (HNP) an anthology of 51 writers from 19 Caribbean territories which explore through poetry, drama and prose issues surrounding climate change; and editor of Voices: Dramatic Monologues for Caribbean Actors (HNP) a collection of 35 dramatic monologues, fifteen of which were written by her and now extensively used as a resource by teachers across the Caribbean in their Performing Arts classes. In 2023 she performed at the Medellin International Poetry Festival in Columbia and the World Poetry Movement in Caracas, Venezuela. Weekes has read extensively throughout the Caribbean and in London and is the first Caribbean poet to read at the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Poland. Most recently her award-winning Volcano has been published in Spanish by La Pequeña a publishing house based in Puerto Rico by translator Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón of Ohio University. Having completed a filmmaking course at Ealing Studios Weekes began utilizing and combining poetry, performance and film in her activism. Her first short film "Grief" won the Best Director's award in 2019 by the Barbados Visual Media Festival. She has produced a two-part drama documentary Centro de Orientación e Investigación Integral (COIN) exploring gender-based violence When "Love" Goes Wrong. Her short film "Volcano Baby" which explores the impact of climate crisis on the lives of girls and children, was commissioned by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an arm of the United Nations. Weekes was awarded an Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow for 2025 to 2026. In 2024 she was awarded the Order of Excellence for her contribution to Arts, Culture and Education by the government of Montserrat
