The ACWWS’ Digital Archive aims to preserve and make accessible the intellectual history of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS), with a particular focus on the legacy of its conferences and the cross-cultural exchanges among Caribbean scholars and writers. The Association was founded in 1994 to sustain the momentum sparked by the 1988 Caribbean Women Writers Conference and to advance creative writing and critical work on Caribbean women. Learn more about the Association at acwws.org.

The idea of the digital archive began in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Anaridia R. Molina recognized the need to make ACWWS’s conference history and archival materials accessible. Anaridia then secured funding from the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) Micro-grant, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant to digitize ACWWS’ materials and develop this website. These grants enabled a research trip to Florida International University’s (FIU) Special Collections & University Archives, where the ACWWS collection is housed.

In 2023, the ACWWS’ Digital Archive launched with two collections—Conferences and Newsletters—and continues to grow as additional materials are digitized and added. Support for this project was provided in part by Digital Scholarship @ U-M.

In 2025, Anaridia worked to establish ACWWS as a partner with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) to ensure both broader visibility and long-term preservation and sustainability for this collection. This partnership builds on earlier efforts to preserve MaComère, the Association’s journal, by former ACWWS archivist Vicki Silvera and Brooke Woolridge, former Florida International University's dLOC director. ACWWS collections of journal volumes, newsletters, and conference programs in dLOC are available at dloc.com/collections/iacwws.

Credits  & Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michael Grafals, Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Florida International University, for helping digitize materials for the website, and to Avery Haynes, undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, for helping develop the metadata.

Various individuals have inspired and supported this project in various ways: Opal Palmer Adisa, Giselle Anatol, Carol Bailey, Joe Bauer, Matthew Carruthers, Hope Cullinan, Gaurav Desai, Alex Gil, Maria Laitan, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Supriya M. Nair, Caitlin Pollock, Linda Rodríguez Guglielmoni, Vicki Silvera, Andreína Soto, and Donna Aza Weir-Soley.

This project is also inspired by previous work in Caribbean digital studies. For more information, visit the Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship (CariDiScho).