Kendel Hippolyte Biography

Caribbean poet and dramatist, born in Castries, St Lucia, educated at the University of the West Indies; he teaches at St Mary's College, St Lucia, where he is closely involved as a playwright and director with the Lighthouse Theatre Company. Much of his drama is experimental and improvisational. Drum- maker, his best-known work for the stage, was published in Keith Noel's edition of Caribbean Plays for Playing (1981). The play's uncompromising use of idiomatic Caribbean language and its concern with the political context of indigenous Caribbean culture are equally characteristic of his poetry. Collections of his verse, which rejects the formal traditions of European lyric poetry in favour of the freer models provided by American modernism, include Island in the Sun, Side Two… (1980), Bearings (1986), and The Labyrinth (1991). Hippolyte is the editor of the anthologies Confluence: Nine Saint Lucian Poets (1988) and So Much Poetry in We People (1990).