Front Cover Painting and Design by Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné
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Peepal Tree Press My Poetry Corner May 2024 features the poem "To Enter My Mother's House" from the debut poetry collection Doe Songs by poet and artist Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2018). The collection won the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.
Born in 1986 in the twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad & Tobago, Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus, where she later completed a Creative Writing Course in Poetry, taught by award-winning Trinidadian poet Jennifer Rahim (1963-2023).
Danielle was raised by her two grandmothers: Her maternal grandmother is of East Indian descent; her paternal grandmother is African and Chinese. One of her grandmothers was a secondary school English teacher who introduced her to reading and writing poetry at an early age. But it was not until joining Jennifer Rahim's creative writing class that Danielle saw the power of poetry and committed to the craft.
"Poetry speaks not only of your brain and soul, but of your belly, your bones," she said in a 2010 interview with Caribbean Literary Salon. "It is that bare truth and intensity that I love so much about poetry… the physicality of those simple words."
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