Lorna Goodison

One of nine siblings – including journalist, author, playwright Barbara Gloudon (1935–2022) – Goodison is married to author and retired English literature professor J. Edward (Ted) Chamberlin and they live in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, Canada.

Lorna Gaye Goodison CD (born 1 August 1947) is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades.

She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.

Lorna Gaye Goodison was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1 August 1947, her birthday coinciding with Emancipation Day.

She was one of nine siblings (who include the award-winning journalist Barbara Gloudon).

Goodison was educated at St. Hugh's High School, a leading Anglican high school in Jamaica, and studied at the Jamaica School of Art, before going on to the Art Students League of New York, where she studied under African-American painter Jacob Lawrence.

As well as painting, Goodison has written poetry since her teenage years, some of her early poems appearing anonymously in the Jamaica Gleaner.

She has described poetry as "a dominating, intrusive tyrant. It's something I have to do – a wicked force".

She states that Derek Walcott was a major influence on her writing.

She has spoken of how Dante and his Divine Comedy impacted on her work, and has said: "I didn't choose poetry—it chose me."

In her 20s, back in Jamaica, Goodison taught art and worked in advertising and public relations before pursuing a career as a professional writer.

She began to publish under her own name in the Jamaica Journal, and to give readings.

Goodison's first book to be published was the 1980 volume of poems Tamarind Season.

Goodison's 1986 book of poems, I Am Becoming My Mother, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and her 2013 volume, Oracabessa, won the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.

Tamarind Season was followed in 1986 by I Am Becoming My Mother, for which Goodison received the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Americas.

Her subsequent poetry collections include Heartease (1988), Poems (1989), Selected Poems (1992), To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (1995), Turn Thanks (1999), Guinea Woman (2000), Travelling Mercies (2001), Controlling the Silver (2005), Goldengrove (2006), Oracabessa (2013) and Supplying Salt and Light (2013).

In the early 1990s, Goodison began teaching part of the year at various North American universities, including at the University of Toronto and at the University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.

and is now Professor Emerita.

Goodison has also published three collections of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), Fool-Fool Rose Is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and By Love Possessed (2012).

Goodison's work has appeared widely in magazines, has been translated into many languages and over the past 25 years has been included in such anthologies as Daughters of Africa (1992), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003), the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature (2006).

Poet and literary scholar Edward Baugh says "one of Goodison's achievements is that her poetry inscribes the Jamaican sensibility and culture on the text of the world".

Together with issues of home and exile, her work addresses the power of art to explore and reconcile opposites and contradictions in the Caribbean historical experience.

Kei Miller notes: "Primarily a poet, Goodison hasn’t been afraid of crossing the fence into other genres: she has written short stories and a much-celebrated memoir. ...I suspect she still isn't as celebrated as she really ought to be because there simply doesn’t exist the perfect critical language to talk about what she is doing, the risks she is taking, and why exactly they succeed."

Also an artist, Goodison has exhibited her paintings internationally, and her own artwork is usually featured on the covers of her books.

In addition to poetry, Goodison has published collections of short stories and essays, as well as the memoir From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island, which in 2008 was the recipient of one of Canada's largest literary prizes, British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and in May 2009 was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.

In 2008, her non-fiction book, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island – "a lyrical and luminous tale that spans several generations" – won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, Canada's largest prize for non-fiction.

The memoir was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in May 2009, read by Doña Croll.

Lisa Fugard's review in The New York Times concluded: "Goodison's praise songs can be found in her many volumes of poetry and now in this loving memoir. It's a legacy that can be traced back to her infancy, when Goodison's mother dipped her finger in sugar and rubbed it under her daughter's tongue, ensuring her the gift of sweet speech."

Goodison has said that during the dozen years it took her to write From Harvey River she drew inspiration from the work of John Keats, whom she first encountered studying the English Romantic poets on her Jamaican school syllabus.

Oracabessa, described as "a book of risky journeys, mappings and re-mappings through Spain, Portugal, Canada and her homeland of Jamaica as the poet navigates place, history and imagination", won the Poetry category of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, when the judges stated: "In Oracabessa the distinctive voice of Lorna Goodison–an elegant, captivating fusion of international English and Jamaican Creole–presents segments of autobiography as a series of travels. Goodison's persuasive art is a many-sided celebration of spiritual search."

Her most recent poetry collection, Mother Muse, was published in 2021.

Ben Wilkinson wrote in The Guardian: "Her writing is often a celebration of the spirit and tenacity of women; in various ways, Mother Muse ... extends this feature of her work."

Mother Muse "orbits around two important 'mother' figures in Jamaican music: Sister Mary Ignatius, the nun who ran Kingston's Alpha Boys School, celebrated for nurturing musical talent; and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood, a celebrated dancer and lover of ill-fated musician Don Drummond — who was an Alpha Boys alumnus. Other poems contemplate, celebrate, and elegise woman ranging from the famous to the tragic to the unknown."

She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017 (succeeding Mervyn Morris), serving in the role until 2020.

Since 2017, Goodison has worked with dub poet and martial arts trainer Cherry Natural (born Marcia Wedderburn) to host a series of summer workshops pairing poetry and self-defence for girls aged from nine to 17, held at the Institute of Jamaica.

Goodison's collection of essays, Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures, was published in 2018 by Myriad Editions – "a gathering of people, voices, stories, and the fruits of great labor", as characterised by SX Salon, while the Montreal Review of Books stated that "Goodison's collection privileges moments of effervescence, where feelings are strong and some kind of revelation is just below the surface."

The book featured in The Observer as one of "20 classic books by writers of colour", being chosen by Margaret Busby.

Redemption Ground was published in Canada in 2023 by Véhicule Press.

In 2019, Goodison was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

In 2019 she was appointed Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona campus.