From The Publisher’s Desk
Featured essay
Writing Jamaica Without the Postcard
There is a version of Jamaica that exists for people who do not live there. Warm, green, a beach in it. Writing against that version is most of the work — and it starts in the records rather than the notebook. On what changes when the place is one you are descended from, and why the gaps stay visible. Alongside the new novel, Provision Ground: The Land They Could Not Prove.
Read the essay →The archive is not silent. It is loud, and specific, and full of everything except the people you came looking for.
Start here
Land and legacy
Why Jamaicans Have Scottish Surnames
Campbell, Grant, Douglas, Stewart. How Scottish names reached Jamaica through overseers and plantation records — and what a surname can and cannot tell you about descent.
Read →Research
How to Trace Jamaican Ancestry
The five sets of records, in the order to open them. Civil registration from 1878, the parish registers before it, and what to do at the wall most people hit in the first month.
Read →From the Desk
New Eden, Jamaica: What the Climb Taught Me
A settlement above the flood line in Portland Parish, and what a year of walking uphill with borrowed shoes taught me at twenty.
Read →On the craft
Honest Erotica: What It Is and What to Read
Erotica written for women readers rather than about them — what honest desire on the page looks like, why women’s fiction carries it, and the two books to read first.
Read →Everything from the Desk
Fetching the archive…
The Maroon House Reader
First look at every new title, straight from the publisher’s desk.
Excerpts before release, notes on what we’re acquiring, and the occasional dispatch from Jamaica.
Free, and sent when there is something worth sending.
Every essay from the Desk
On Caribbean writing, inheritance, the archive, and the business of publishing it.
Caribbean fiction & the literature
- Caribbean Fiction Is Not Magical Realism
- Language, Power, and Accent in Caribbean Fiction
- The Literary Caribbean Novel vs. Diaspora Fiction
- Caribbean Ghost Stories Are Not Horror
- The Jamaican and Caribbean Literary Greats
- Black Women Writers of the Caribbean
- Writing From the Diaspora, Without Apology
- Jamaica Is Not a Mood Board
The archive, the land, the record
- Why Do Jamaicans Have Scottish Surnames?
- How to Trace Jamaican Ancestry
- How to Read the 1834 Slave Compensation Records
- Oral History vs. the Archive
- Swift River: Jamaican Flood History and the Ghost Novel
- Ritual Is Not Superstition
- Colonial Education and Caribbean Identity
- The Afro-Turks of Istanbul
- Angelo Soliman in Vienna
- I Learn Her Silence
Publishing, and how it works
- Why Caribbean Stories Get Edited Into Oblivion
- Publishing Standards and Good Writing
- Why I Started Maroon House Press
Crime fiction and the institution
Desire, the body, and the erotic
- What Is Literary Erotica?
- Desire, Power, and the Supernatural in Paranormal Erotica
- Why Jamaican Erotica Is Often Misread or Erased
- Why Women's Fiction Carries the Most Honest Erotic Writing
Press & Media
Maroon House Press is an independent publisher of Caribbean and diaspora storytelling, founded and published by Nikki Woods. Twenty-five titles in print across eleven authors and seven genres.
Review copies
We provide digital review copies to reviewers, booksellers, librarians and media. Tell us the outlet and the title you want and we will send it.
Interviews
Nikki Woods is available for interview on independent publishing, Caribbean and diaspora literature, Jamaican folklore in fiction, and the nervous system work behind Nervous System Capitalism™. She spent two decades in syndicated radio, including the Tom Joyner Morning Show.
Assets
High-resolution cover images, author photographs and the press logo are available on request. Please credit Maroon House Press.
Contact
Email thehouse@maroonhousepress.com. We answer press inquiries faster than anything else in the inbox.
The Maroon House Reader
First look at every new title, straight from the publisher's desk.
Excerpts before release, notes on what we're acquiring, and the occasional dispatch from Jamaica. Sent when there's something worth sending. Join the Reader
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