Background of Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison born on 1 August 1947 in Kingston, Jamaica. A painter before she turned her

focus to poetry, Goodison was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the School of the Art

Students League in New York. She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica in 2017. In 2018, she

received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold

Medal for Poetry.

Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and

Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), Controlling the

Silver (2005), Traveling Mercies (2001), Heartease (1988), and Tamarind Season (1980). She is

also the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed (2011), Fool-fool Rose is

Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), as

well as the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), which

won the BC (British Columbia) National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a finalist for

both the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. In 2019,

she published Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures. Her work is also featured in

numerous anthologies, including the Longman Anthology of British Literature (third edition,

2006), the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (third edition, 2003), and

the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (1996). Goodison is the editor of New Voices:

Selected by Lorna Goodison, Poet Laureate of Jamaica, 2017–2020.

Goodison’s image-rich and socially- and historically-engaged poems often inhabit the lives and

landscapes of her Jamaican homeland. “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica,”

Goodison stated in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora. Goodison also

discussed the humor in her work, noting, “Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a

way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it

says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is

make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and

so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture.

And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated

me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being.” Noting that Goodison

often “complements her careful observation of the physical world and her fine eye for detail with

a tense, lean, elliptical style” in a review of Supplying Salt and Light, Jim Hannan observed, “At

their best, Lorna Goodison’s poems observe the unsavory in history and society even as they

guide us firmly toward sources of redemption. With compassion and empathy, Goodison writes

about human failure and triumph in large and small measures.”

A member of the Jamaican National Commission to UNESCO, Goodison was awarded

Jamaica’s Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999. She also received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for

the Americas for her second book of poetry, I am Becoming My Mother (1986). Professor of

English and of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Goodison

divides her time between Ann Arbor, Toronto, and the north coast of Jamaica.