Notes on contributors to issue 3

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Mahadai Das (1954–2003) was a Guyanese poet, actor, dancer, and teacher. During her lifetime she published three collections of poems: I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), and Bones (1988). In March 2010, Peepal Tree Press will publish her collected poems, A Leaf in His Ear, including many previously uncollected pieces and unpublished work.

Patricia Kaersenhout is a Dutch artist with Surinamese roots, based in Amsterdam. She recently participated in the Wakaman Project, a series of exchanges between Surinamese artists working at home and abroad. Her book Invisible Men, reproducing a series of works on paper, was published in 2009. The two works reproduced in this issue of Town are from a new series in progress.

Dhiradj Ramsamoedj, born in 1986, is a Surinamese artist, and one of the participants in Paramaribo SPAN, with his Adjie Gilas project. He is a graduate of the Nola Hatterman Institute and has shown his work in several group exhibitions.

Marcel Pinas is a Surinamese artist based in Moengo. He was born in 1971 in the Ndjuka village of Pelgrimkondre, and studied at the Nola Hatterman Institute in Paramaribo and the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica. He has shown his work widely both in the Caribbean and internationally, and has established a cultural and contemporary art centre in Moengo. He designed the Moiwana Monument memorialising the massacre of the inhabitants of the Maroon village of Moiwana in 1986, during Suriname’s civil war. The photograph of the monument in this issue of Town was taken by Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier, who is the co-curator of Paramaribo SPAN.