Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

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Patricia Jabbeh Wesley reads at the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress in 2017

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (born August 7, 1955 in Tugbakeh, Maryland County ) is a Liberian poet and professor of creative writing and African literature. She has lived in the United States since 1991. In her poems she often takes up the themes of “women at war” and “life in exile”, especially with reference to the civil war in Liberia and the African diaspora .

Life

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley initially lived with her mother and moved to her father and his family at the age of 14. She grew up in the Monrovia neighborhood of Capitol Hill. She describes her childhood as unhappy as she was subjected to the abuse of her stepmother. She studied at the University of Liberia in Monrovia, where she graduated in 1980. She obtained her master's degree in English Education, supported by a World Bank scholarship, from Indiana University Bloomington in 1985 .

Until the beginning of the Liberian Civil War , Wesley taught English and literature at the University of Liberia. She married Mlen-Too Wesley, who also taught at the university. After seven years of marriage, she moved with him and their then two children to a house on Pagos Island, a residential area in Monrovia's Congo Town district, which is partially surrounded by the Mesurado River . They grew crops there and kept poultry and pigs for self-sufficiency. After the civil war hit their area in July 1990, they had to live in refugee shelters, had little food and were exposed to life-threatening situations. In March 1991 they finally migrated to the USA.

The Wesley family, which now has four children, settled in southwest Michigan . Patricia Jabbeh Wesley ran writing classes for elementary school students. In 1998 she published her first volume of poetry Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa , in which she describes the effects of the civil war in Liberia. She resumed her studies and received her PhD in creative writing with a publication Becoming ebony from Western Michigan University (WMU) in 2002 . In this collection of poems, she processed personal experiences about the civil war, the death of her mother and life in the African diaspora . For this work she won a second prize at the Crab Orchard Awards and a book contract in the related poetry series of the Southern Illinois University Press. At WMU she taught African and African-American literature as well as creative writing.

Wesley later moved to Pennsylvania and taught as an associate professor at Penn State Altoona from 2005 . She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and African Literature there. She published two other books of poetry, The River is Rising (2007) and Where the Road Turns (2010) with Autumn House Press, and brought out a children's book, Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea (2013). Her fifth collection of poems, When the Wanderers Come Home , came out in 2016. In it, Wesley describes her impressions of a trip to post-war Liberia that she took in 2013. For her literary work, Wesley received an award in the Arts & Letters category from the organization WISE Women of Blair County in 2016.

Selected Works

  • Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa , New Issues Press, Kalamazoo 1998
  • Becoming Ebony , Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 2003
  • The River is Rising , Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh 2007
  • Where the Road Turns , Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh 2010
  • Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea , One Moore Books, Brooklyn 2013
  • When the Wanderers Come Home, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 2016

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Grant Jarrett: The House That Made Me: Writers Reflect on the Places and People that Defined Them . SparkPress, 2016, ISBN 978-1-940716-32-9 ( google.de [accessed October 5, 2019]).
  2. ↑ a b Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Retrieved October 5, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Ph.D. Retrieved October 5, 2019 .
  4. ↑ WISE: Women honored for making our community a better place | News, Sports, Jobs - Altoona Mirror. Retrieved October 5, 2019 .


personal data
SURNAME Wesley, Patricia Jabbeh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Liberian poet and professor of creative writing and African literature
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Tugbakeh, Maryland County