Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Mordecai’s first poem was written when she was nine, about a hurricane that hit the island of Jamaica in that year. She was born and grew up there, “going to the nuns” at age four and leaving them at age twenty-one. By then she had gone to the USA and had done a first degree in English at a small Catholic college in Massachusetts that she helped to integrate. Returning to Jamaica after college, she taught, became involved in theatre and modern dance, and began writing seriously. She went to the University of the West Indies to do two teaching degrees, and eventually a PhD. (It took her sixteen years to write.)

A bit of a hurricane herself, she he has been a teacher, a trainer of teachers, a TV host, a writer-researcher, an editor, a book packager and a publisher. She has written newspaper editorials, dance criticism, textbooks, critical articles on Caribbean literature, studies on Caribbean culture, education, and publishing, poems and stories for children, poems and short stories for adults.