Patricia Jabbeh Wesley will welcome her second reading audience at the Peace Cafe, 17 Street, Tubman Boulevard, on July 21lst in the Liberian seaside capital of Monrovia, to kick start Liberia’s Independence Day festivities.
Dr. Wesley, a Penn State Associate Professor of English is currently on an academic visit, hosting her first reading audience at her Alma Mater, the University of Liberia auditorium a week ago. An award-winning poet, Jabbeh Wesley is a motivational speaker, writer, and a Liberian civil war survival.
The author of several poetry books, she has written: Where the Road Turns in 2010, and The River Is Rising in 2007, which won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry.
Those collections were followed by Becoming Ebony in 2003, and then adding Before Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa. Those four collections of works raised the profile of the Poet and introduced her to new audiences around the world.
Not since Bai T. Moore and Doris Banks Henries has any Liberian Poet gives much to Liberian poetry and literature, given the astounding volumes she has written in recent years. “Wesley’s poems have also been featured in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry,” according to the Poetry Foundation, America’s premier poetry site.
“Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in Monrovia, Liberia, and raised there and in her father’s home village of Tugbakeh, where she learned to speak Grebo in addition to English, the national language. In 1991, Wesley immigrated with her family to southern Michigan to escape the Liberian civil war. She earned a BA at the University of Liberia, an MS at Indiana University, and a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University.”
Dr. Wesley recently published a children’s book, In Monrovia, The River Visits The Sea, and published by One Moore Book Publishers.
—-ralph geeplay
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