Lorna Goodison

Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Lorna Goodison is a leading world poet, as well as accomplished storyteller, memoirist, and essayist. In a series of ground-breaking books of poetry published over forty years, from Tamarind Season (1980) to her 600-page Collected Poems (2017), she has written poems of extraordinary music, sensuous texture, and powerful historical imagination. They straddle the divide between oral and literary traditions, between Creole and visionary rhetoric, in liquid turns that are supple, quick, barely visible. Her poetry journeys into the recesses of her personal, familial, and historical past, unflinchingly mourns the wounds of Caribbean history, and yet celebrates the region’s multiple peoples, cultures, religions, and languages.