Joan Cambridge-Mayfield

(Georgetown, British Guiana, 1940) is an Afro-feminist environmental protector, former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home (Ticknor & Fields/The Women’s Press). In the 1970s Joan worked for Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. By the 1980s Joan had walked away from an appointed scholar’s desk at the Library of Congress to head for the Guyana rainforest where she spent nearly two decades immersed in her environment, researching, writing, and working on her parcel of the “last of pristine Amazonia” at Yukuriba Falls on the Essequibo River. In the 1990s Joan’s musical drama, Ting-a-Ling-a-Ling, Schoolbell Ring: Di Bush Tun Reenforest, received support from the United Nations. Her writing has appeared in the Antioch Review and was anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (edited by Margaret Busby; Jonathan Cape/Pantheon) and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders (edited by Epifania Akosua Amoo-Adare and Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa; DIO). Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow to Julian Mayfield, and is forever following his profound jumbi wisdom, strength, and guidance.