Elizabeth Nunez (80), a Trinidad-born writer whose novels explored the legacy of colonialism and the immigrant’s longing for home – while making fun a American academia and New York City’s publishing world – died of a stroke on Friday at her home in Brooklyn.

Elizabeth Ann Nunez was born on Feb 18 1944, in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago, one of 11 chidren of Una Magdalena (Arneaud) Nunez and Waldo Everette Nunez. Her father was a Junior officer in the ministry of labor: who late become the commissioner of labor, and then an executive at Shell Oil.  Una raised chickens. The Nunez children were expected to excel, and to be stoic in their efforts. Her proper Catholic mother kept her at arm’s length and the tension of that relationship would inform many of the female characters in Dr. Nunez’s novels.  Her mother who read all of her books, and how was a constant cheerleader, while her father never read a single title. She attended Marian University, a private Catholic institution in Fond du Lac, Wis., on a scholarship, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1967. Then she moved to New York City, where she got a job as a caseworker with the Department of Social Services. Riding the subway to work one day, she saw a sign advertising jobs for teachers at Medgar Evers College, which was then just a year old. She was hired to work in the English department and became the chair of the department, and then provost and senior president of academic affairs, before0 leaving in 2009.  She earned her master’s degree and a Ph.D. in literature from New York University. In 2010, she became a distinguished professor of English at Hunter College, where she remained until retiring this spring.

She married Clifton Daniel Harrell, a sociology professor at Megar Evers in 1974 and subsequently divorced in 1994. She is survived by her son and her 10 siblings and two grand daughters.  

Dr. Nunez was raised in a prominent Trinidadian family of Portuguese and African descent, educated in the British colonial system – heavy on the Western canon.  Growing up, she loved stories by the English children’s book author Enid Blyton, whose adventurous young characters she tried to emulate by wearing cardigans in the hot Caribbean sun and affecting a taste for cucumber sandwiches. She was known as Betty until she was 11, when she persuaded her parents to drop her childhood nickname after reading “Pride and Prejudice” and identifying with Jane Austen’s strong heroine Elizabeth Bennet.

In 1963, she attended a Roman Catholic college in Wisconsin, where she was typecast as “a black English girl”. She knew her European history, but next to nothing about the Caribbean and the brutal story of colonialism. Her ideas about Africa was Eurocentric, as she thought Africa was a continent of savages, running around in grass skirts and even Tarzan was involved.

 She wrote her first novel, “when Rocks Dance” in 1986, she ended up writing mostly about the society she had left behind, the clash of modernism and mysticism  and also her homeland’s dark history.

Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell was a retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” set on a former leper colony off Trinidad, exploring the legacy of colonialism and the struggle for belonging in an adopted country.

The Protagoinst of her second novel, “ Beyond the Limbo Silence” in 1998, is like Dr. Nunez, a young Trinidadian sent to college in Chilly Wisconsin – in a town that “had not Negroes”, she wrote who becomes involved with a Black law student and civil rights activist. “ I wanted to explore the resentment, the justified –to me – resentment of an African to a Caribbean person who’s in La-La Land”, she told Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire, a literary Journal in 2022,

The Male Protagonist of “Grace” (2003), who thought at a small public college in Brooklyn, also shared some of Dr. Nunez’s experiences. He found himself at odds with his Black American colleagues, as Dr, Nunez did when she taught at Medgar Evers College, a small predominantly Black public institution in Brooklyn.

In her Memoir, “ Nor for Everyday Use” (2014) she recalled a colleague there snapping at her for her ambition. “ You can’t come here on your banana boat and feel you take what my people have suffered and died fo, “ she recalled the colleague saying. “Our blood was spilled to get this college. Know your place.”

“Prospero’s Daughter” (2006) recast Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” setting the story on a former leper colony off Trinidad, with the rumour of a rape and the efforts of a xenophobic and very British detective to get to the bottom of it.

Dr. Nunez was the author of 11 novels, most recent “ Now Lila Knows” was published in 2022. From 1986 to 2000, she was the director of the National Black Writers Conference, an annual event she founded with the novelist John Oliver Killens, which was connected to the Center of Black Literature.