Rampersad was born in rural Trinidad. She 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. 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.
Education
Rampersad was the first sitting journalist/editor in the Caribbean to hold a PhD.[citation needed] She completed her PhD at the University of the West Indies following a bachelor's degree in which she earned first-class honours.
Awards and fellowships
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 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. She also received a Commonwealth Professional Fellowship and is considered a Commonwealth Gender Scholar.
In 2018, Rampersad won the National Medal (Gold) for Distinguished Contributions to the Development of Women/Journalism.
Educator
Rampersad is a pioneer and specialist scholar and educator about the intersection of education, media and culture in the world of new media. She has worked on media strategies for the Commonwealth Foundation and the 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, and Arcade/Acted.[1][2]
Rampersad facilitated the training of multisectoral communities in Belize, Jamaica, Grenada and elsewhere in Intangible Cultural Heritage and community capacity development and preparation of dossiers for UNESCO World Heritage.
Rampersad was President of the UNESCO Education Commission, Vice President of the Subsidiary Body of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Vice President of the Commonwealth Journalist Association.
She founded, with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the Trinidad Theatre Workshop Fund for Literature, Drama and Film.
Books
Rampersad has written several books. The first, Finding A Place: IndoTrinidadian Literature (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002) explores the groundbreaking arena of society-formation and the socio-cultural, economic and political adaptations of early colonial migrants as well as 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,. 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]
Sir Vidia S. Naipaul himself commended the publication as revealing much about his father.
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]
Rampersad also wrote and published LiTTscapes - Landscapes of Fiction from Trinidad and Tobago.[9] This was the official commemorative publication of the Jubilee/50th anniversary of the independence of Trinidad and Tobago. It captures Trinidad and Tobago's literary heritage up to the time of the Jubilee of Independence with photographic representations of towns, villages, cultures, festivals, landscapes, and nature, and more than 100 works of fiction. It has received widespread critical acclaim. It is associated with LiTTeas, LiTTours and LiTTributes, all of which are available on request Rampersad's GLoCal Knowledge Pot, a platform for education and interconnected heritage at krisrampersad.com.
In August 2019, Rampersad released her line of children's fiction with Festival Fables, with I the Sky & Me the Sea, The Adventures of Munnie Butterfly & Danny Dragonfly, Book 1.[10]
Harold Sonny Ladoo was a Caribbean novelist, who was the author of two books documenting the struggles of living in poverty in the Hindu communities of Trinidad and Tobago. He moved to Canada in 1968 and was mysteriously murdered while on a visit to Trinidad in 1973.
Shiva Naipaul, born Shivadhar Srinivasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was an Indo-Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist.
Samuel Selvon was a Trinidad-born writer, who moved to London, England, in 1950. His 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is groundbreaking in its use of creolised English, or "nation language", for narrative as well as dialogue.
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The second volume (1989) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Trinidad and Tobago literature has its roots in oral storytelling among African slaves, the European literary roots of the French creoles and in the religious and folk tales of the Indian indentured immigrants. It blossomed in the 20th century with the writings of C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul and Saint Lucian-born Derek Walcott as part of the growth of West Indian literature.
Caribbean Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Indo-Caribbean people and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. It is a koiné language mainly based on Bhojpuri. This language were the most spoken by the Indians who came as immigrants to the Caribbean from Colonial India as indentured laborers. It is closely related to Fiji Hindi and the Bhojpuri spoken in Mauritius and South Africa.
Seepersad Naipaul was a Trinidadian writer. He was the father of writers V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul and Savi Naipaul Akal, and married into the influential Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.
Raymond R. Ramcharitar is a Trinidadian poet, playwright, fiction writer, historian and media and cultural critic.
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
Rampersad, also spelt Ramprasad or Rampersaud, is a surname common in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, the Caribbean, Fiji, South Africa, and Mauritius. The name is common among Caribbean Hindus, but also among others as a result of ethnic mixing. It is also common among many Christians as well. Many people of this surname have migrated to the United States and Canada as well. Sundar Popo wrote a song called Rampersad.
Stella Piari Abidh (1903–1989) was a Trinidad and Tobago public health physician. She served as the Medical Officer of Health for San Fernando and as medical supervisor of schools in south Trinidad. She is believed to be the first Indo-Trinidadian woman to become a doctor.
Mohamed Ismith Khan, better known as Ismith Khan, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born American author and educator. He is best known for his novel The Jumbie Bird, a semi-autobiographical work which blends Indian and Afro-Caribbean mythology and experience to explore the creation of a new Indo-Caribbean identity.
The Jumbie Bird is the first novel by Trinidad and Tobago-born novelist Ismith Khan. Published in 1961, the semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of the Khan family, an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim family living in Port of Spain. The novel explores the transformation of formerly indentured Indian immigrants in Trinidad and Tobago into Indo-Trinidadians.
Kevin Jared Hosein is a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer from Trinidad and Tobago. He is known for winning the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with his story "Passage". He also won the regional (Caribbean) section of the prize in 2015, with "The King of Settlement 4".
Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer. She was awarded the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2013 for "The Whale House".
Savitri (Savi) Naipaul Akal was a memoirist and teacher from Trinidad. She was the daughter of author Seepersad Naipaul and his wife Droapatie, and the sister of V. S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul.
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