Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Wesley Receives the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award
Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, professor of English, creative writing and African literature at Penn State Altoona, has been selected as the 2023 recipient of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award from Saginaw Valley State University.
Wesley immigrated to the United States with her family during the 14-year Liberian civil war, a war that has helped shape her writing as a Diaspora African woman writer in the United States. For more than two decades, Wesley’s poetry has given voice to the voiceless, the hundreds of thousands of Liberian war dead through its exploration of themes on the plight of the refugee of war, the new African Diaspora mother/wife and African femininity, motherhood, home, displacement, and the survivor as a witness.
As a literary scholar and professor, Wesley has conducted research on Liberian women’s war stories, served as elected Executive Committee Member and Chair of the African Literature Division of the Modern Language Association (MLA 2003- 2008), and has presented numerous papers on her own poetics, African literature, African poetry, and poetry as a genre at several international conferences and literary festivals in the US and around the world. In 2008, she was commissioned by Advocates of Human Rights as an Expert Witness in the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minneapolis, MN, on the Liberian civil war, where she presented both her wartime experiences as a witness and her research over the many years of the Liberian civil war.
Her poems have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Awards. Patricia’s poetry has been extensively reviewed and has been the subject of book chapters by literary scholars of literature across the world, including recent reviews in the UK, the US, Scotland, Canada, and Africa. Reviewers have explored her work’s contribution to gender issues, Africans in the Diaspora, exile, women in war, and Liberia for more than two decades now.
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