Rekindling Writing Passion, Adjusting To Life with Diagnosis

Jomo Tafari Dixon is a 26 year old aspiring writer, learning to appreciate that when you commit to chasing your dreams, even detours lead to self-discovery. While growing up in Spanish Town and attending Ardenne High School, where he graduated valedictorian, the now Kingston resident and Communications Officer, thought that his passion was solely for acting. In high school, Dixon was not only excelling at local competitions and festivals, such as the JCDC Speech and Drama Festival, and the Caribbean Secondary Schools Drama Festival, but he was also acting professionally in local theatre productions, television commercials and short films. 

Over time his passion grew to include directing, when he won his first director’s award at the Tallawah Festival of the Arts, as the Assistant Director of Tribe Sankofa, a performing arts group that tackles social issues related to the Black experience in the West. 

Financial circumstances led Dixon to pause his love for theatre to embrace his academic interests, and in 2015, he left Jamaica on full scholarship to pursue a degree in Political Economy and Development at the Minerva University, a new highly selective private liberal arts university in San Francisco, California, where he was one of only two Caribbean students in an international cohort. As part of the school’s curriculum, Dixon got the opportunity to live and study in several major cities around the world—Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul and Hyderabad—while being trained in seeing the world as one big interconnected interdependent mix of distinct-but-not-separate realities.

 Around the time of this diagnosis, Dixon had restarted engaging with the arts, but found that for the first time, he wanted to do more than just acting and directing—for the first time, he wanted to write because he actually had something he felt he needed to say, he had a personal story to tell. Immediately he started sharing his own work publicly, and was invited to participate in poetry reading sessions at the University of the West Indies, as well as to join a contingency of poets representing Jamaica at the Leira Poetry Festival, under the tutelage of Opal Adissa Palmer, and tackling the social impact of the ongoing pandemic on Jamaican families. Working in communications for the past three years, Dixon has fully embraced his passion, as writing has come to take a central role in even his professional ambitions. 

Today, despite still acting and directing, his dream is of being published. Dixon believes that he is now fearless in the face of this pursuit, because he can draw from experience to build confidence. He knows that the very act of chasing that dream, will lead him to discover new aspects of his passion, his voice and himself