Want fewer ads?

Patricia Powell (born 1966) is a Jamaican-American writer.

Born in Jamaica, she moved to the United States in her late teens. She received her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others.

She began her teaching career in 1991 in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2001, Powell was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. In 2003, she was announced as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at MIT.

Most of her work is not autobiographical, but explores personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Patricia Powell", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0