Kendel Hippolyte has been described by The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry as ‘Perhaps the outstanding poet of his generation’. Born in St.Lucia in 1952, he studied and lived in Jamaica in the 1970s, where he explored his talents as a poet, playwright and director. As a poet, his writing ranges across the continuum of language from Standard English to the varieties of Caribbean English and he has also written poems in Kweyol, his nation language. He works in traditional forms like the sonnet and villanelle as well as in so-called free verse and in forms influenced by rap and reggae. He has published five books of poetry, the latest being Night Vision (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2005)and his poetry has appeared in various journals such as The Greenfield Review, The Massachusetts Review and in anthologies like Caribbean Poetry Now, Voiceprint, West Indian Poetry and others. He has also edited Confluence:Nine St.Lucian Poets and So Much Poetry in We People, an anthology of performance poetry from the Eastern Caribbean as well as student anthologies from creative writing students at the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College where he teaches.
He has experience of poetry workshops as both student and teacher. He has designed and taught poetry workshops of different kinds and levels, including one in April 2000 at Ty Newydd, a well-known writers centre in Wales. He has attended workshops taught by poets like Derek Walcott and Mervyn Morris and was a student in the Caribbean Writers Summer Workshop when it was organised from the University of Miami. In July 2001, he was the poetry tutor for that workshop, now based at the Cave Hill Campus, University of the West Indies.
He has twice won the Literature prize in the Minvielle&Chastanet Fine Arts Awards, for many years the premier arts award scheme in St.Lucia. He has been the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship to study poetry and an OAS scholarship to study theatre. He was awarded the St.Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) in 2000 for his contribution to the arts. |
