WriterLorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison was born in Jamaica, and has received much recognition and many awards for her writing in both poetry and prose, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Americas Region), the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and most recently one of Canada’s largest literary prizes, the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. Her work has been included in the major anthologies and collections of contemporary poetry published in the United States, Europe and the West Indies over the past fifteen years, most recently in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) as well as the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, and the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Her work has also been translated into several languages, and published widely in magazines from the Hudson Review to MS Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the Americas and in Europe; and she has published three collections of short stories, including Baby Mother and the King of Swords (Longman,1990) and Fool-Fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2005). Her books of poetry include Tamarind Season (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica,1980), I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon, 1986), Heartease (London: New Beacon, 1988), Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), Turn Thanks (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), Travelling Mercies (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001), Controlling the Silver (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006).  Her latest book, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and her People, was published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 2007, in the United States by Harper Collins/Amistad, and in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Books. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, By Love Possessed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011)

She has been a central figure at festivals such as Poetry International at the South Bank Centre in London, England; the Harbourfront International Poetry Festival in Toronto; the Poetry Africa Festival in Durban, South Africa; the National Black Writers Conference in New York; the Interlit International Conference in Erlanger, Germany; Poetry International in Rotterdam; the Cuirt Literary Festival in Galway and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in England. In the past couple of years, she has given readings at Cambridge University and the Sorbonne, Paris; delivered the Dame Nita Barrow Memorial Lecture at the University of the West Indies and the Frank Collymore Lecture in Barbados; and participated in a celebration of Fifty Years of Poetry at Radcliffe at the Bunting Institute in Harvard University. She has also read at schools, cultural centres, hospitals--in rural as well as urban communities--throughout the world.

Lorna Goodison has taught at the University of Toronto, as well as at the University of Miami Caribbean Summer Institute, the University of the West Indies Caribbean Writers Program, the Sitka Summer Institute in Alaska. She has also conducted special workshops in the United States, Canada, Europe and the West Indies. She divides her time between Kingston, Jamaica; Toronto and Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia; and teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan, where she is the Lemuel A. Johnson Collegiate Professor.