Lorna Goodison Biography

Jamaican poet, born in Kingston, Jamaica, educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the Art Student League of New York. Her paintings have been widely exhibited and she is highly regarded as a book illustrator. She has worked as an art teacher and as a writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts. Her principal collections of poetry are Tamarind Season (1980), I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), Heartease (1988), To Us All Flowers Are Roses (1990), and Selected Poems (1992). Many of her poems achieve powerfully imaginative effects through her use of domestic and natural imagery to evoke the interaction of psychological and material factors in women's experience of Caribbean history. Her work is notable for its accomplished fusions of elements of conventional versification with qualities integral to the oral traditions of Jamaica. Her other publications include Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), a collection of short stories forming compassionate explorations of the aspirations and fears of ordinary Jamaican individuals.