Colony 51 is a novel told through interwoven stories and set in a post-apocalyptic near-future where the people of Perla, a fictional Caribbean island, have been stripped of all rights by the governing mainland. After a worldwide crisis, the island is industrialized and forced to supply foodstuffs and labor to the mainland, its people's stories erased. Piecing together the storytelling of two girls forced into submission, readers learn the island's true history. A very timely and powerful story told by Puerto Rican writer Jane Coralin.
A graduate of Binghamton University and a proud member of the Cave Canem poetry community, Jane Coralín's work appears widely in journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, The Bilingual Review, Louisiana Literature Review, The Acentos Review, Paterson Literary Review, Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture, Rock and Sling: A Journal of Witness, and Skinny Poetry Journal. Beyond the page, Jane has presented her work throughout the U.S., including the New York Botanical Garden where her poetry is part of the African American Garden Poetry Walk. Jane is the co-author of the novel Sister Chicas (Penguin/NAL), which won the Mariposa International Award for Best First Novel in English. After years on the island of her birth, Puerto Rico, Jane returned stateside to join the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University as an Assistant Professor of English. Colony 51, a post-apocolyptic novel, is her second book of fiction.
"Like the whorls on a spiral shell, the narratives of this intricate and beautiful novel build and wind, periods of time overlapping and feeding each other, all while telling an urgent and essential story.... Colony 51 is quite possibly the most important Puerto Rican novel of its generation." — Ann Dávila Cardinal, author of The Storyteller's Death and We Need No Wings
"Jane Coralín's Colony 51 is an impressive amalgamation of literary, speculative, dystopian fiction, with a biting social commentary on colonization—how a super-power nation can erase and enslave an island's people. There are stories-within-stories, where entrancing characters float through non-linear 'Books,' only to reappear in each other's 'Books.' Time floats too, through the 'then-then' to the 'Removals.' Coralín's poetic, often mythic occurrences, and her sharp, compassionate vision, has rendered Colony 51 a unique, stunning achievement." — Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of How Not to Drown and Secrets of the Lost Daughters (April 2027)
"Jane Coralín has written a book of fantasy, a book of history and a book of spells. Time travelling is her game. Colony 51 retells the story of one of the oldest colonies in the world 'Puerto Rico'... It is a story of war and resistance, of motherless and fatherless children who grow up to become rebels and protectors of life and continuity." — Mayra Santos-Febres, author of La otra Julia and Our Lady of the Night
