Born 1951 in Southampton, Stewart Brown is a poet, painter, editor and critic. He studied art and literature at Falmouth School of Art, the University of Sussex and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He spent periods teaching in schools and universities in Jamaica, Nigeria, Wales and Barbados. Since 1988 he has taught in The Centre of West African Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he is now Reader in Caribbean Literature. He has travelled widely through West Africa and the Caribbean in relation to both his research and creative writing, and lectured for the British Council in both regions. He has edited several anthologies of African and Caribbean writing, most recently The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2001) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005). He has also edited critical studies of the great West Indian poets Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Martin Carter. A collection of his essays on poetry, Tourist, Traveller, Troublemaker was published in 2007.