Jason Allen-Paisant (born Jason Allen) never expected his life to unfold quite like this. Looking back, it feels like the realization of dreams he didn’t even know he had—victories against high odds,
and a deep gratitude for it all. He was the first in his family to take A-levels, let alone attend university. In many ways, he is the fulfillment of dreams his ancestors carried long before he was born.
He always knew he wanted to be a writer. But for years, he deferred that dream, choosing instead the supposed stability of an academic career. In the early 2000s, when he embarked on graduate school, university life seemed like the surest path. Still, poetry never left him. Even as he pursued graduate studies at Oxford thanks to a scholarship, his relationship with writing deepened, his craft sharpened. It was there, between rigorous study and creative discovery, that he began publishing his first poems. Oxford also led him to Paris, where he spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure. Those were the years when the earliest drafts of what would later become Self-Portrait as Othello began to take shape.
Strangely, though, it wasn’t that book but another—Thinking with Trees—that would first catapult him into the world as a published poet. That collection arrived like a force of nature, an unstoppable current pulling him in, demanding to be written. It belonged to its particular moment, emerging from the precise circumstances of his life at that time—circumstances he explores further in The Possibility of Tenderness.
By 2019, everything shifted. If nothing else, he understood this: he was, above all else, a writer. Not just someone who wrote, but someone for whom writing was existentially necessary. Being a poet, a storyteller, a creative force—this had to be the foundation, the centre from which everything else radiated. Even his academic work, his intellectual pursuits, would now be framed through the lens of this creative calling.
That shift has shaped his career in profound ways. To date, he has published two academic monographs—Théâtre dialectique postcolonial, a study of Caribbean theatre (yes, once upon a time, he was an amateur actor too!), and Engagements with Aimé Césaire, a philosophical treatise taking the Martinican poet and thinker as its starting point. He has also guest-edited multiple scholarly journal issues and continues to serve on the board of Callaloo.
But it is in his creative writing that he has found his true voice—his own way of speaking, of telling the stories that matter most. Over the past five years, he has become increasingly certain that literature must centre those whose lives and histories have too often been overlooked. He draws inspiration from the likes of Erna Brodber, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, and Annie Ernaux—writers who have reimagined what is possible in literature.
Today, he has published three major literary works: two award-winning collections of poetry and one book of literary nonfiction, The Possibility of Tenderness. And he is not done yet.
For him, writing is about lineage, about community, about carving out space where it has been denied. His work is an invitation: to listen, to engage, to reimagine what stories are worthy of being told.
So, to those reading this—welcome. There is more to come.
