The principal aim of this assignment is to account in some small way for some of the page poets of the Caribbean diaspora who have emerged in Kamau Brathwaite's wake and whom we won't otherwise read.  A second, but equally important, objective is for you to develop your literary research skills by helping to build an ongoing, reliable reference source for successive generations of students and the general public.  To both these ends, you'll work in teams to produce an introductory web page devoted to one of the following poets:

If for some reason you'd like to rearrange the membership of your group by trading with someone else, that's fine—as long as we keep the same number of people in each group.

Don't worry:  you won't actually have to wrestle with the web design.  Give me the material you've assembled in Microsoft Word format, and I'll plug it all into a uniform series of web pages.  If you want to spruce up your web page with photos, graphics or sound, that's great, though not absolutely required.  Give me any such materials on a diskette—or provide me with URLs.  (It's your job to acquire any necessary permissions.) Your first priority is to create useful, meaningful content that will provide an interested but unfamiliar reader with a brief but pithy introduction to your poet.

This project was begun by a past class; you can view their work by following the links below.  The specifications they followed were similar though not entirely identical, much of their work needs expanding and updating, and the quality of their work varies widely, so use caution and critical judgment in imitating what they've done. Still, their example should serve as useful points of reference.

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General Overview:  You might model your work, in part, on the "authors" pages of the Postcolonial Studies site at Emory University, the "poet" pages of the Academy of American Poets or the "Authors" pages of the Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English site based at the National University of Singapore.  For consistency’s sake, here is the bare minimum of what your site should include:

Additional (optional) sections might include one or more of the following:

If you can spruce up your web page with photos, graphics or sound, that's fine, but not required. (As always, it's your job to acquire any necessary permissions.)  Your first priority should be to provide useful, meaningful content that will provide an interested but unfamiliar reader with a brief but pithy introduction to your poet.

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How to Proceed:  This is a group project, but how you decide to break down the work within your group is up to you.  You might simply decide to distribute responsibility for each of the above tasks to a different member of the group, then get together later to edit and combine the results collectively.  You may choose to assign one unusually capable person the job of "editor-in-chief":  s/he would be responsible not just for proofreading, but for establishing consistency of quality, style and tone.  You'd all agree in advance that s/he would also have the power to tell you when your work isn't up to snuff and to assign you to go back to the drawing board.  (As a last resort, s/he would have final editorial control, including the power to reshape or rewrite your work.) 

Be flexible.  If, once you begin working, it emerges that your original division of labor isn't equitable—that (for instance) there just isn't enough material out there to keep a webliographer busy for very long—then the webliographer may have to double up with, say, the person writing the Critical Introduction, who (it may turn out) has a ton of stuff to sift through.  In rare instances, you may need to merge two jobs into one, and reshuffle all the other jobs accordingly.

You'll want to get together as soon as possible, so that you can agree upon a timetable and a division of labor.  Set some meetings and deadlines along the way where you can periodically present your individual work to the rest of the group for friendly, collective review, feedback and critique.  Since you're all sharing a grade, you'll want to work cooperatively to set and maintain standards of quality control, and to agree in advance on how to deal with someone who doesn't pull their own weight!

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Deadlines and details.  A first draft of your page is due no later that Wednesday, April 25th--but sooner would be better.  I'll put the drafts online for feedback and commentary from me and the rest of the class.   (Feel free to compare notes and exchange ideas with other groups before then, though.) 

You should be ready to unveil the final version no later than the final day of class (May 7), but possibly as early as May 1.  Everyone in the group should have some role to play in the presentation.

I'll ask for a short self- and group assessment from each member of the group when you're done.

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Evaluation Criteria:

1. Coverage: have you done all you can to find good, reliable information?

2. Coherence: this is a group project but the end result should be a unified effort. Superior projects will present a seamless final product that features a consistent level of writing and reflects the sum of everyone’s work.

3. Quality: these pages will be part of an on-going public reference source residing on my web site. Don't embarass me or yourselves, then: demonstrate the excellence of Humboldt student writing! Be clear, direct, cogent and coherent.  (That this work should be free of egregious mechanical errors should go without saying.)

One final note on stylistic conformity: every discipline has certain conventions; ours are dictated by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Take this opportunity to learn the basics and perhaps some of the finer points of the MLA style of bibliographic citation.