(Ramlochan, Shivanee) Shivanee Ramlochan’s poetry has been published in tongues of the ocean and The Caribbean Review of Books, and is forthcoming in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. She is an alumna of the 2010 Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Caribbean Writers. In 2013, she was selected as one of three New Talent Showcase writers at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest. Her poems received the second-place prize in the 2014 Small Axe Literary Competition. In 2015, she was longlisted for the Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers Prize. Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Peepal Tree Press) is her latest collection of poetry. Ramlochan’s poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards. The female force that Ramlochan explores in her poems is creative and destructive, vulnerable and untamable.
