Sasenarine Persaud is an essayist, novelist, short story writer, and poet. He is the author of twelve books: nine poetry collections, two novels, and a book of short stories. His latest books are, Lantana Strangling Ixora, TSAR Books (Toronto, Fall 2011), Unclosed Entrances: Selected Poems, (Caribbean Press, Warwick & Georgetown, 2011) and In a Boston Night, TSAR Publications (Toronto, Fall 2008). He was born in Guyana and has lived for several years in Canada. He has served as a Vice-President and chair of the membership committee of the League of Canadian Poets, as a director on the Board of Directors of the Scarborough Arts Council (Toronto), and on juries for the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council. He presently resides in Tampa, Florida.
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Awards Include: the K.M. Hunter Foundation Award (Toronto, 1996), the 1999 Arthur Schomburg Award (New York) for his writing and his pioneering of Yogic Realism, and Fellowships at the University of Miami and Boston University. Persaud has a Master's in Creative Writing from Boston University. His fiction was shortlisted for the 1997 Journey Prize (Toronto) while his poetry was nominated for the 1998 Canadian National Magazine Award, and several times shortlisted, most recently in 2011, for The Guyana Prize for Literature.
Sasenarine Persaud has pioneered Yogic Realism a term he originated to describe his literary aesthetics; his essay, “Kevat: Waiting on Yogic Realism” was published twice in India. His other essay on Yogic Realism, “I hear a voice, is it mine? Yogic Realism and the Short Story” (originally a paper presented at the Sandhills Writers Conference, Augusta, GA) was published in World Literature Today (74:3, University of Oklahoma, Summer 2000). Yogic Realism and Sasenarine’s work has been the focus of a doctoral dissertation by an Indian Scholar.
Persaud's work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, England, India, Singapore, Malaysia,the Middle East, the United States, and the West Indies and has been widely anthologized, appearing in such publications as: A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories (Marshall Cavendish, Singapore, 2010); Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (Broadview Press, Ontario, 2009); Anthology of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction (Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2007); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (Oxford University Press, 2005); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 2000); The Journey Prize Anthology: short fiction from the best of Canada’s new writers (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997); The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Verse (Heinemann, London, 1992); Another Way to Dance: Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States (TSAR, Toronto, 1996); and Caribbean New Voices (Longman, London, 1995).