Amanda Choo Quan

Amanda Choo Quan's writing charts the future of social justice movements — while acknowledging their genesis in the Caribbean. Her preferred subtopics are displacement, migration, cruelty, and examining the ways white supremacy has successfully divided Black and Brown populations. She is curious about reparations meaning far more than money, and wonders what a Black transnational state could look like. She is interested in uncovering the ways the United States helped to transform the English-speaking Caribbean from socialist intellectual hotbed into tourist backyard. Her most recent work focuses on telling the stories of Maroons in the Caribbean and their present fight for Indigenous recognition. She is interested in Marronage as a philosophy to counter the flimsiness of this political moment.

Essay by Amanda Choo Quan for Harper's Bazaar.

Amanda Choo Quan is a writer, artist and essayist who is both Trinidadian and Jamaican. Winner of the 2020 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers' Prize, one of the most significant for emerging writers from the region, she is also a Truman Capote, Callaloo, Juniper, REEF Residency and Cropper Foundation fellow. Writing about race, class, and Caribbean culture, she's been published in Harper's Bazaar, Teen Vogue, NYLON, the Huffington Post, LitHub, and Caribbean Beat, among others. She's a graduate of both the California Institute of the Arts and the University of the West Indies. These days, she's either in Trinidad or on an even smaller island off its coast (no, not Tobago). Or maybe elsewhere, chasing a story. She tweets @amandacq.