Edward Baugh

A poet, biographer, and leading scholar of postcolonial Caribbean poetry, Baugh was one of the inventors of the field as we know it. In books like West Indian Poetry 1900-1970 (1971), he wrote the history of Caribbean poetry, tracing it to its nineteenth-century beginnings and establishing the critical trajectory.

His second book was the first full-length study of a then-obscure poet from Saint Lucia, Derek Walcott. Subsequent biographies of Walcott and Frank Collymore record and memorialize the lives of an important generation of postcolonial poets. As a critic, public orator, award-winning poet, and editorial board member for Small Axe and Journal of West Indian Literature, Baugh was a principal voice for Caribbean poetry and culture. His Derek Walcott, a critical survey of Walcott's work to date, appeared in 2006. He edited, with introduction, Walcott's Selected Poems in 2007. 

He also published three collections of his own. poetry, the most recent, Black Sand: New & Selected Poems, in 2013.