Leonard Dabydeen is a Guyanese-born Canadian from the county of Berbice, Guyana, South America. He was formerly a teacher, headmaster, and a lecturer at the Government Teachers' Training College in Industrial Arts Education. He holds a bachelor of education degree from the University of Guyana and currently a licensed paralegal and member of the Law Society of Upper Canada. He began creative poetry writing in the sugar plantation of Rose Hall, Canje, Berbice, Guyana, during the hiatus of British colonial rule prior to Independence in 1966. He contributed poems in the local Berbice Tmes newspaper in the early 1960s and later won the Freedom House Poetry Prize sponsored by the People's Progressive Party under the pen name Leovski Donov. In Canada, his first published poem was in the Indo Caribbean World newspaper, titled "Not Wanting to Be a Refugee" (1984). Online, namely, Helium.com, Poemhunter.com, Poetfreak.com and Inspirationpeak.com, he contributed over six hundred poems to date and counting. On Facebook he is a prolific contributor of poems, with connections in American Life in Poetry and Indian Poetry Society. He has published several book reviews in the online SouthAsian magazine. He has a WordPress blog entitled Poems Jogging in the Mind. He is the author of Watching You: A Collection of Tetractys Poems, Xlibris Publication (2012).
