Reading by the Author of “Pleasantview” Celeste Mohammed

Lawyer-turned-author Celeste Mohammed penned the novel Pleasantview (Ig Publishing, 2021), which won the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Author Tony Eprile called Pleasantview “a formidable debut” and added that the book’s “razor-sharp observations of misogyny and the abuse of power are leavened by humor and a pitch-perfect ear for the language of human.” Her work has appeared in The New England Review, Litmag, Epiphany, The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She was also awarded the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. As a native of Trinidad and Tobago, Mohammad’s goal is to dispel all myths about island life and island people and to highlight the points of intersection between Caribbean and North American interests. Sponsored by the department of English and creative writing and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund.