Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a professor of English, creative writing, and African literature at Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. She immigrated to the United States with her husband and children in 1991, during the First Liberian Civil War. Wesley is the author of six collections of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, Becoming Ebony, and When the Wanderers Come Home (Nebraska, 2016). Kwame Dawes is a professor of literary arts at Brown University and the director and series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. Marguerite L. Harrold is the author of Chicago House Music: Culture and Community. She is a PhD student in English (creative writing) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is the author of three collections of poetry: The Dream in the Next Body, A Hundred Silences, and The History of Intimacy. She teaches at Pennsylvania State University.

"Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a rare figure: an African woman poet who has received high honors and become a public figure whose words have reshaped the public and literary discourse about Liberia. . . . It has taken years to arrive at the position she holds. She has had to navigate an inability to imagine an African poet of her gifts and presence. But her work has overcome this and created the future she already foresaw as a child in Monrovia. . . . Today Wesley is among the most celebrated poets of the new African Diaspora."--Gabeba Baderoon, from the introduction