NEW YORK, NY- Guyanese-born journalist Felicia Persaud is the lone female winner of this year’s Caribbean Tourism Organization Travel Writer/Photographer of the Year Awards.
The editor of the U.S.-based Caribbean World News Network, a multi-media syndicated news service that focuses largely on the Caribbean Diaspora, was among the winners at last Thursday`s annual awards ceremony.
Persaud, an alumnus of the University of Guyana’s mass communications programme, won the award for Best Feature for the Caribbean media category for a story she wrote in December on a St. Maarten Rastafarian.
The story titled, `Rastafarian Turns St. Maarten Hillside Into Organic Farm’, won the honour in the category. The story was part of several pieces Persaud wrote on St. Maarten, during her travel there late last year.
St. Maarten’s Commissioner of Tourism, Frans George Richardson, presented the award to Persaud along with CTO Secretary General, Hugh Riley at a media awards luncheon held last Friday at the New York Hemsley Hotel.
Persaud is also CEO of the minority-certified PR and advertising agency, Hard Beat Communications, Inc., and founder of CARIB ID, the campaign to get Caribbean nationals their own category on the U.S. Census form.
Persaud recently advocated for and secured a congressional and senate bill that calls for an ancestry identify category for Caribbean nationals to be added to the U.S. Census form.  Her column, Immigration Korner, appears in several papers including The New York Amsterdam News and she is the winner of a New York Association of Black Journalists Award, two Independent Press Association Award for excellence in writing and several community proclamations and awards. She is heard weekly on WWRL 1600 AM radio in New York along with Rennie Bishop and produces the monthly Caribbeat in Focus page for the New York Daily Newspaper.
Other award winners on Thursday included Michael Nassar of the New York Daily News for Best Feature Article in a Consumer Newspaper; Joe Pike for Best Feature Article in a Trade Publication and Peter Jon Lindberg for Best Feature Article in a Consumer Magazine.
The annual awards were created to `reward writers and photographers for their excellence in covering Caribbean tourism.(`CaribPR Wire)