Alan Warhaftig taught English at LAUSD’s Fairfax High School for 24 years and served as co-coordinator of the Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts for 18 years. He first became interested in the Caribbean when he read Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal as a freshman at Stanford. As a sophomore, he began to study with St. Clair Drake, a pioneering anthropologist and renowned Caribbean scholar. He subsequently collaborated with Trinidadian writer/historian/political philosopher C. L. R. James on a documentary video project and screenplay adaptation of James’s novel, Minty Alley, the first novel by a West Indian to be published in the U.K. (Photo by Cynthia Buiza.)