Pamela Mordecai

Jamaican writer and scholar (born 1942)

Pamela Claire Mordecai (born 1942) is a Jamaican born poet, novelist, short story writer, scholar and anthologist who lives in Canada.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, she attended high school in Jamaica, and Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Newton, MA, where she did a first degree in English. A trained language arts teacher with a PhD in English from the University of the West Indies, she has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, trained teachers, edited an academic journal, and worked in media, especially television, and in publishing. Mordecai has written articles on Caribbean literature, education and publishing, and has collaborated on, or herself written, more than 30 books, including textbooks, children's books, six books of poetry for adults, a collection of short fiction, a novel, and (with her husband, Martin Mordecai) a reference work on Jamaica. She has edited several anthologies, including the Sunsong series. Her poems and stories for children are widely collected and have been used in textbooks in the UK, Canada, the US, West Africa, the Caribbean and Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in journals and anthologies in the Caribbean, the US and Canada. Her poetry was included in the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa. Her play El Numero Uno had its world premiere in February 2010 at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in Toronto, Canada. Mordecai has lived in Canada since 1994, but the Caribbean experience, both in the region and in the diaspora, continues to be an important preoccupation in her writing. In 2013 she was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. In spring 2014, she was a fellow at Yaddo artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Some of her works are written in Jamaican creole.