Faith, his daughter's name says it all. Stephen A. Dantes is now a 25 year old husband and father. Yet Dantes, the second child of a family of eight recalls when his dad left himself and his 3 other siblings. He was only eight then but his dad has never returned to St.Lucia since then. His mom later had his last four siblings with his stepdad. Dantes reminisces about his mother's mom, his grandmother. She gave her grandchildren whatever they asked for that she could afford, giving Dantes the satisfaction of receiving what ever he wanted!

In school, Dantes excelled in all his subjects, especially Mathematics, also finding school life very rewarding. His competitive attitude strengthened but even then his teachers felt Dantes was not living up to his full potential. One teacher did not permit him to participate in a mathematics competition on the grounds of his nonchalant attitude. "I knew that I couldn’t because my home and school environment were not in sync", he discloses.

After more condemnation from an English teacher, Dantes immediately despised the subject. Yet, he still worked hard and with a dose of a little discipline ... he proved her wrong. He continued his education and completed his A'Levels, majoring in Mathematics, Economics & Accounting.

Soon after, Dantes returned to his old neighbourhood and schools to teach. He most recently attended the Division of Teacher Education and Educational Administration (Sir Arthur Lewis Community College) where he majored in Mathematics and Social Studies. Now he awaits his final results.

What's ironic, today this teacher is called a poet. Some of his published and known works are:
“The Enchanting Excerpts” - a a literary product to his fellow countrymen to satisfy the many people who do not love reading poetry.
“The Last Enchantment” - a collection of poems, words of wisdom, prayers, thoughts, feelings, commentaries, drawings and excerpts from a novel he is working on.
“Caribbean Poem” - He promoted it in Barbados as he was single-handedly trying to let artistes contribute to the CSME initiative.
“Surrendered Revenge” - he won second place in the St. Lucia National Arts Festival

Though, I only know Stephen Dantes for his self-designed website, called DantesDesign.net. The first ever, locally designed website that exposes St.Lucian arts. Dantes interviews many musicians, poets, writers and other artistes. Dantes also designs their web pages too, determined to give them their own place on the internet. Stephen Dantes' mission is to publicize local St.Lucian arts to the world and to put St.Lucia and its people on the world map.

There was a brief time when Canadian visitors outnumbered the number of St.Lucian (home country) visitors to DantesDesign.net over a 60-day period. He admits that his St.Lucian visitors are once again in the lead.

After many sleepless nights, Dantes has taught himself web design, cartoon animation & music production. He is proficient in Macromedia Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop, Steinberg Nuendo and Cubase, Cool Edit Pro, Ulead 3D Production, Roxio and many others. ... And I suppose there shall be some more sleepless nights for Dantes. He is currently learning Maya and 3D Max and the Adobe CS3 Suite software.


He's determined to defy his circumstances, and ends with this last quote:

"I am who I am, the whom nobody knows!"