Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems; When the Wanderers Come Home; Where the Road Turns; and Becoming Ebony. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Transition, New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and her work has been translated into several languages. She immigrated to the United States in 1991 with her husband and children after surviving two years of the fourteen-year series of Liberian civil wars. Her awards include the 2022 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize for Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, a 2022 Levinson Prize from Poetry Foundation, a 2022 Edward Stanley Poetry Prize for her poem, “My Name is Dawanyeno,” a 2002 Crab Orchard Award, among others. Her newest book, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, the first comprehensive body of literature from Liberia since that nation’s independence in 1847, was released from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2023. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.

An Excerpt From the Introduction
by co-editor Pamela Uschuk

I am deeply grateful that The River Is Rising, the seminal book of poems by Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, the foremost African woman poet writing today, is being reissued. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and her family fled their native country of Liberia after suffering tremendous privations and violence during the bloody Liberian Civil War in 1991. These poems are more than the story of one woman who carried her children over dead bodies, walking dozens of miles from Monrovia, through dirty streams amidst government soldier and rebel killing fields, fleeing bombs and constant gun battles, who with her husband and small children were forced to survive on roots in a displacement camp outside Monrovia, where they witnessed every kind of crime against women. Jabbeh Wesley did more than survive. She helped other women. She wrote.

Praise for The River Is Rising

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's The River Is Rising is both brilliant and heartbreaking. Survivor of the brutal Liberian Civil War, Wesley bears witness to a life she lost to that war, and to what it means to be a refugee who has remade herself.... "To every war," she says simply, "there are no winners." I am in awe of these beautiful, necessary poems, and the glory and largesse of Wesley s vision. —Cynthia Hogue

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's poetry is heartfelt, wise, and alive... One senses in her that rare combination of someone who has been deeply schooled in both literature and life, and who has integrated those two into a deeply felt and shrewd worldview. —Stuart Dybek