Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian poet, memoirist, writer, professor and human rights activist. She is the current Poet Laureate of Liberia. 

Escaping the civil war, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley left Liberia for the US in 1991, where she earned a PhD in creative writing and literature from Western Michigan University. Having started writing poetry at thirteen, she published her debut poetry collection Before the Palm Could Bloom in 1998. For her second publication, Becoming Ebony (2003) she was awarded the Crab Orchard Award. Her latest poetic collection Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems (2020) was honoured with the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, the judge Pamela Uschuk describing it as ‘profoundly spiritual, human, and ferocious’.

Jabbeh Wesley’s poetry deals with themes such as the African Diaspora and hybrid identity, home and displacement, femininity and motherhood. Her tone continuously shifts between grief and levity. As a survivor of the Liberian civil war, she gives a voice to the voiceless, as a poet and activist, but also through her scholarly work and as editor of the anthology Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (2023).

Next to her six books of poetry, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has published poems in several magazines such as Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and The New York Times Magazine, winning the Edward Stanely Poetry Prize for her poems My Name is Dawanyeno and When My Husband Prays as well as the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation for the poems Healing Will Come and Black Woman Selling Her Home in America. Her poetry has been translated into various languages, including Spanish, Italian, Finnish, and Hebrew. She is currently serving as professor of English, Creative Writing, and African Literature at the Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona campus.