Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, a nonfiction writer, and an anti-war and human rights activist.
Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a poet, fiction writer, a nonfiction writer, and an anti-war and human rights activist who began writing in her original home country of Liberia, West Africa, since the early age of thirteen. She immigrated to the United States with her family during the 14-year Liberian civil war, a war that has shaped her writing as a Diaspora African woman writer in the United States.
Autographed copy of “Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry”, (University of Nebraska Press, 2023
Autographed copy of “Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems” (University of Nebraska Press, 2020)
Autographed copy of “When the Wanderers Com Home” (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)
Autographed copy of “Becoming Ebony” (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003)
Autographed copy of “Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa”, (New Issues Press, 1998)
Autographed copy of “In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea” (One Moore Book, 2012)
Fresh off the Press
Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, published by University of Nebraska Press, Jan. 2023, is the first comprehensive collection of literature from Liberia since before the nation’s independence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has gathered work from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders. In this collection, Liberia’s founding settlers wrestle with their identity as African free slaves in the homeland from which their ancestors were captured, and writers of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries find themselves navigating a landscape at odds with itself.
From poets of Liberia’s past to young writers of the present, the contributors to this volume celebrate the beauty of their nation while mourning the devastation of a long, bloody civil war.
Purchase available through the publisher or on Amazon.
Readings, Writers Workshops, One-on-One Consultations with me by Workshop Participants, hosted by the Sarasota Poetrylife Festival 2023
Award-Winning Poets Martín Espada and Patricia Jabbeh Wesley offer poetry writing workshops: "Poetry Like Bread" and "Finding Healing."
March 19-22, to be honored and to Receive the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award of $10,000. In Saginaw, MI. I will visit high schools, read my poetry, conduct poetry workshops with students, and speak to the University and the Award Committee and the University community during the three day visit
oh my! This book of beautiful strong poems is the very best book I've read in many years. The poems are breathtaking and reading them for me is both a deeply moving and instructive experience. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's amazing world and her amazingly powerful womanhood, her love of her native Liberia, her family, her U.S. life, and o here as poet and teacher, and her passion for life itself all come through in these pages. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Pat Fargnoli
" Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, unlike many other bi-coastal writers, has discovered, finally, a voice that blends the Liberian repetition and musicality to the Midwestern (and now, Northeast) flat hills and flattened accents. Her stories are troubling--wars that are personal and contentious; issues of raising children in a space not her own, yet completely her own; finding new ways to negotiate the spaces she finds herself paddling in; a now adult daughter, emboldened by her college-freedom; coming to terms with the loss of her mother. These are the troubled waters of content in Jabbeh Wesley's new collection, but there is language here and tone that are adept at saying precisely what lies at the river's shallow edges and deep ends. Jabbeh Wesley has stories to tell & languages & music & precision to tell them."
