The pres­ti­gious Casa de las Am�ri­c­as Prize for Caribbean Lit­er­a­tures in Eng­lish or Cre­ole has been award­ed to a lo­cal po­et–Dr Jen­nifer Rahim PhD, Se­nior Lec­tur­er in the De­part­ment of Lib­er­al Arts at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI), St Au­gus­tine–based of her 2009 po­et­ry pub­li­ca­tion en­ti­tled Ap­proach­ing Sab­baths (Peepal Tree Press). No­ti­fi­ca­tion of the prize was giv­en on 28th Jan­u­ary 2010 by Maite Hern�ndez-Loren­zo, di­rec­tor of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Im­age in Casa de las Am�ri­c­as, which was found­ed in April 1959 as a Cuban cul­tur­al award sole­ly.

In 1976 a ju­ry was es­tab­lished for Caribbean Lit­er­a­tures in Eng­lish, the prize be­ing then award­ed to schol­ar/writer Ed­ward Brath­waite. The first lo­cal to be award­ed the Casa de las Am�ri­c­as prize in po­et­ry, Rahim is well-known on the lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al lit­er­ary cir­cuit, where her po­ems have ap­peared in jour­nals and an­tholo­gies such as The New Voic­es; the Trinidad and To­ba­go Re­view; the Catholic News; The Caribbean Writer; Cre­ation Fire (1990);; Wash­er­woman hangs her po­ems in the Sun (1990); The At­lanta Re­view; and the Gra­ham House Re­view. Rahim's dis­tinc­tive po­et­ic artistry was recog­nised and ho­n­oured as ear­ly as Po­et­ry Day 1981 when her po­et­ry earned the Mar­guerite Curtin Book Prize.

To date, Rahim has pub­lished three col­lec­tions of po­ems, name­ly, Moth­ers Are Not the On­ly Lin­guists and Oth­er Po­ems (New Voic­es, 1992); Be­tween the Fence and the For­est (Peepal Tree, 2002); and Ap­proach­ing Sab­baths (Peepal Tree, 2009), the lat­ter be­ing the ba­sis of the Casa de Las Amer­i­c­as prize.

To her fur­ther cred­it, Rahim has au­thored nu­mer­ous schol­ar­ly pub­li­ca­tions in lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, pub­lished one col­lec­tion of short fic­tion en­ti­tled, Song­ster and Oth­er Sto­ries (Peepal Tree, 2007), and edit­ed Heart to Verse: word­lines from UWI (New Voic­es, 2008), the col­lec­tion com­pris­ing po­ems by stu­dents of Rahim's 2007 Cre­ative Writ­ing class at UWI. Rahim's most re­cent work is joint ed­i­tor­ship of Be­yond Bor­ders: Cross-Cul­tur­al­ism and the Caribbean Canon (UWI Press, 2009).

Rahim is cur­rent­ly on sab­bat­i­cal in Cana­da and her e-mail ad­dress is:

n jen­rahim@ya­hoo.com