Sasenarine Persaud (Fiction 2006) has just had a story, “After God a Customs Officer,” and four poems (“Library Assistant”, “Remembrances”, “Letters” and “Leaves”) published in the Spring issue of South Asian Ensemble (Canada)–all previously unpublished work.
Congratulations, Sase!
Sasenarine Persaud is a Tampa-based essayist, novelist, poet and short story writer, who originated the term Yogic Realism to describe his aesthetics. His work and Yogic Realism has been the focus of a doctoral dissertation. Canadian Literature calls him “one of those rare poets who gets the recipe of humanness exactly right” and The Halifax Chronicle Herald “dauntlessly brainy…a bit like reading T.S. Eliot mixed up with Rabindranath Tagore…. Persaud’s poems are unapologetically learned.” His awards include: The KM Hunter Foundation Award (Toronto) and the Arthur Schomburg Award (New York). He was the Leslie Epstein Fellow at Boston University. On his fiction, The Globe and Mail writes, “Persaud’s breathtaking narrative….nimbly pits self-ironizing postmodernism against the timeless values of narrative.” Sase’s most recent books are Lantana Strangling Ixora (TSAR Books, Toronto, 2011), Unclosed Entrances: Selected Poems (Caribbean Press, Warwick & Georgetown, 2011) and In a Boston Night. (TSAR, Toronto, 2008). His work has been included in several anthologies including: Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today (TSAR, Toronto, 2012); The Bowling Was Superfine: West Indian Writing and West Indian Cricket (Peepal Tree, Leeds, 2012); A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories (Marshall-Cavendish, Singapore, 2010); Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (Broadview, Peterborough, 2009); Anthology of Colonial and Post Colonial Short Fiction (Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2007); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005); The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2000); and The Journey Prize Anthology: short fiction from the best of Canada’s new writers (McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1997). His work has been published in eight countries, spanning four continents and is used in colleges and universities in Canada, England, Guyana, India, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the United States. Sase was born in Guyana (South America) and has lived in Toronto for several years.
