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2nd Annual Louise Bennett Coverley Memorial Lecture

Caribbean Heritage Month

Guest Speaker Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica

2nd Annual Louise Bennett-Coverley Memorial Lecture 

The Louise Bennett-Coverley Heritage Council, in collaboration with the African American Research Library and Cultural Center, and under the distinguished patronage of the Consul General of Jamaica, R. Oliver Mair,  presents  the Hon. Lorna Goodison - Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan, Poet Laureate of Jamaica  and   recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry-2019.

Accomplished writer and artist,  Miss Goodison  will explore the relationship of Miss Lou with Maya Angelou and other African American authors, in her lecture entitled  ‘Miss Lou, Maya Angelou and America’.

Guest Speaker: Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, and a major figure in world literature.

She is the author of From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People; Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures is her first collection of essays and was published by Myriad in August 2018. Her work is included in major anthologies of contemporary poetry and has been translated into many languages. Born in Jamaica, Lorna Goodison now lives in Canada. 

Lorna Goodison has received many honors including Jamaica’s prestigious Musgrave Medal (1999) and is the second official Poet Laureate of Jamaica. She is the first woman to hold the title. Invested on May 17, 2017, she marked her first Emancipation Day (August 1) in the role, with the poem “In Celebration of Emancipation”, which commemorates the end of the enslavement of African people in Jamaica. Ms. Goodison is the recipient of numerous prizes for her works, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas in 1986 for her second book of poetry, I am Becoming My Mother and the 2018 Windham Campbell prize for Poetry from Yale University.

She is the author of twelve collections of poems, three collections of short stories, an award-winning memoir and a collection of essays. For the past thirty years, her work has been included in the major collections of contemporary poetry published in the United States, Europe and the West Indies, including Longman’s Masters of British Literature .   She is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the Centre for African and Afroamerican Studies at the University of Michigan.                       

This Event is in collaboration with Louise Bennett Coverley Heritage Council, Inc..; Friends of the South Regional/Broward College Library; Jamaica Tourist Board; and Jamaicans.com.

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