Kris Rampersad

Kris Rampersad is a writer, researcher, lecturer, journalist, publisher, activist and advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.

Biography

Rampersad started her career as a freelance journalist at the San Fernando office of the Trinidad Guardian, before being called three months later to join the staff of the Port of Spain headquarters, where she has worked in various capacities as reporter of health, education, culture and politics. She has written Guardian columns such as "Discover Trinidad and Tobago", "Teenlife", "Environment Friendly", "In Gabilan", "I Beg to Move", "The Week That Was", and "The C Monologues", as Literarily.

She served as Editor of its U Magazine and Sunday Guardian Editor. She covered most of the Jamaat al Muslimeen coup attempt involving activities at Trinidad and Tobago Television for the Guardian during July 1990. She was one of the founding journalists at Newsday, following completion of a degree in literature and PhD at the University of the West Indies.

Rampersad holds awards in Journalism (BWIA Media Awards for Excellence in Journalism - Social and Economic Commentary and Pan American Health Journalism Award for Excellence in Health Reporting. She also received a Nuffield Foundation Press Award at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, the Foreign Press Centre of Japan Fellowship and a Government of India ITEC Scholarship to the Indian Institute of Mass Communication where she received its highest, the Rajasthan Patrika Award.

Rampersad has worked on media strategies for the Commonwealth Foundation, Caribbean Institute of Agricultural Research and Development, and pioneered the Excellence in Agricultural Journalism Award of 2010. She has prepared, presented and published numerous papers on media, culture and gender including at Caribbean Cultural Diversity to UNESCO, Commonwealth Diversity Conferences, Arcade/Acted, among others.^[1][2]

Books

In addition to her output as a journalist, Rampersad has written two books. The first, Finding A Place: IndoTrinidadian Literature (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002) explores, among other things, the relationship between journalism and fiction in West Indian literature, tracing antecedents to the works of authors such as Seepersad Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, Ismith Khan and Dennis Mahabir, among others. The book is a ground-breaking study that gives context to much of V. S. Naipaul's perspectives on colonialism, the Caribbean and Trinidad and Tobago, placing his writings within the context of some 200 years' gestation in Trinidad and its peculiar social, economic, political and literary evolution. Rampersad argues that the society's complex oral and literary antecedents propelled his acclamation as a 20th-century Lord of the English language and that early experiences of journalism on the island experienced by him and his predecessors, including his father Seepersad Naipaul, legislator/authors as F. E. M. Hosein, Dennis Mahabir, and near contemporaries such as Samuel Selvon and Ismith Khan, influenced their leanings towards expanding the literary tradition in social realism tradition.^[3]

In Finding a Place, Rampersad challenges and rejects the notion of the term East Indians to describe people in Indian heritage in the Caribbean, and traces their migration and adaptation from hyphenated isolation inherent in the description Indo-Trinidadian or Indo-Caribbean for the unhyphenated integration into their societies as IndoTrinidadian and IndoCaribbean that embraces both their ancestral and their national identities.

Rampersad is also the author of Through the Political Glass Ceiling - Race to Prime Ministership by Trinidad and Tobago's First Female, which examines the role of gender, culture and rurality in the success of Kamla Persad-Bissessar as the first female Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in the country's general elections of 2010.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}

See also

• Non-resident Indian and Person of Indian Origin
• Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian

References

External links

• Kris Rampersad page at Creative Caribbean Network.
• Writers, Publishers network.
• International Who’s Who in Cultural Policy Research, ConnectCP.
• Ulema Uddin, HAJI RUKNUDEEN SAHIB Qadi and Sheik-ul-Islamon Caribbean Muslims. Published 06/13/2008.