Dr. Donna Aza Weir-Soley is the incoming President of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars and an Assoc. Prof. of English & affiliate faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s Studies and the Latin American and Caribbean Center at FIU. She was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica and migrated to the US at the age of 17, attending high school in both Jamaica and Queens, New York. She graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1990 and won the Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities to attend the U.C., Berkeley, culminating as U.C. Berkeley graduate with an MA in English (special emphasis in Creative Writing) in 1993, a PhD in English Literary Studies in 2000, and winner of the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship in 2004-2005 to complete her scholarly work, “Eroticism Spirituality and Resistance in Black Women's Writings” (University Press of Florida, 2009). Weir-Soley is the single author of two books of poetry: “First Rain” (full length, Peepal Tree Press, 2006) and “The Woman Who Knew“(chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2016).