The University is hosting the 12th annual International Conference of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars at the Lod Cook Alumni Center.The event, which kicked off Tuesday, will continue until Saturday and will feature sessions where writers, academics and scholars will share their works, explore aspects of Caribbean culture and discuss the audience comments.ACWWS collaborated with the LSU Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies to organize the conference at the University. The theme for this conference was “Caribbean Dislocations/Caribbean Diasporas”.”All of it is designed for an audience who can engage in their works,” said Rhonda Frederick, ACWWS secretary  and professor of Caribbean and African American Literature and Culture at Boston College. “It’s about networking your ideas in your work and about your community.”The conference is dedicated to Haitian activists Myriam Merlet, Magali Marcelin, Anne-Marie Coriolan and victims of the Haitian Earthquake in January.Writers will discuss various literary works and topics related to Caribbean culture as well as works of other Caribbean writers and scholars.Professors from Vanderbilt, St. George’s, Grenda and Xavier Universities talked about national identities in anglophone Caribbean women’s literature in one of the conference sessions.Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, associate English professor at Vanderbilt University,  discussed the nature of cosmopolitanism — the idea all human beings belong to a single community, with a perspective on the history and national identity of Jamaican culture.”Cosmopolitanism as part of Jamaican culture is a constant, but it is definitely configured differently at this moment,” she said.Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison was the keynote speaker on Tuesday. She has written 11 collections of poems and two short stories, many of which have been compiled in the “Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.”Goodison’s speech centered around alienation, as faced by many Jamaicans. She described her own life experiences as she analyzed each of her poems.”All of us have coping mechanisms for staying away from home,” she said.The conference will also feature the works of distinguished Caribbean artist Deborah Jack in the LSU Museum of Art on today.Established in 1994, ACWWS strives to promote the literature and orature of Caribbean women and create an awareness about the global presence of Caribbean people, according to the ACWWS Constitution.ACWWS conferences are held every two years in areas with a Caribbean background or a connection with the culture. The conference invites the general public and Carribean writers and academics who wanted to share their works and experiences.____Contact Sumit Kumar at [email protected]