Jessie Mayers
Photo of Jessie Mayers.
Jessie Mayers is a Saint Lucian writer, filmmaker, and scholar whose work explores Caribbean mythology, magic, and liberation. Across fiction, theatre, film, and literary criticism, she has emerged as a distinctive multidisciplinary voice, exploring the visible realities of Caribbean life and the often shunned, unseen forces that shape it.
Jessie’s professional writing career began in 2019 with “A Little Folktale,” co-written with Monique Auguste. The play was selected as Saint Lucia’s principal contribution to CARIFESTA XIV in Trinidad and Tobago, earning Jessie regional recognition.
She later made history in 2025 as the first Saint Lucian writer shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her shortlisted story, “Redeye Cat,” explores family relationships and the intersections of economic and magical power. Jessie’s fiction has since appeared in PREE, one of the Caribbean’s leading literary magazines. Her story “Touching Ground” offers a poignant reflection on displacement and on conceptions of familial and social attachments.
Her scholarship extends these concerns in her article published in Callaloo, “Transcending the Colonised Body: A Magico-Spiritual Reading of Kei Miller’s Augustown.” Jessie examines how Caribbean people are bound by colonial history, continuing economic subjugation, and contemporary political realities. Drawing on Caribbean mythos and magico-spiritual thought, she investigates how Caribbean people imagine and create liberation in unique ways.
Mythology is central to Jessie’s creative and intellectual practice. More than a recurring interest, it is an artistic obsession: a way to explore the intangible ways Caribbean people understand and construct reality. Her film Shadow Child, shot in Saint Lucia and scheduled for release in February 2027, draws on the bolom—a figure from Saint Lucian folklore—to explore the psychological struggles vulnerable women face.
Jessie views film as a magical artistic tool. For her, cinema does more than reflect society; it provides a space of possibility: to reveal the concealed and give form to what has only been whispered, to transform mythology into images that can be questioned and shared, and to view realities previously unseen. Realities that reflect a Caribbean futurity.
Across every medium, Jessie’s work asserts that Caribbean stories form a sprawling mythos that cannot be peripheralized, as they are powerful ways of understanding Caribbean life and how Caribbean people forge redemptive realities.
