Lorna Goodison

Lorna Gaye Goodison was born on 1 August 1947 in Kingston, Jamaica, the eighth of nine children in a lower-middle-class family, and her birthday coincides with Emancipation Day. Her sister Barbara became the well-known journalist and playwright Barbara Gloudon. She was a painter before she was a poet, and was educated at the Jamaica School of Art and the Art Students League in New York.

Her first book of poems, Tamarind Season, appeared in 1980, and the second, I Am Becoming My Mother (1986), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Heartease followed in 1988. Over four decades she went on to publish about fifteen collections of poetry, as well as three collections of short stories, essays and a memoir, and her poems appear in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and other major anthologies.

Her memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People (2007), tells the story of the village founded by her great-grandfather, William Harvey, and the generations who followed. It won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize. Her 2013 collection Oracabessa won the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry.

From 2017 to 2020 she served as Poet Laureate of Jamaica, the first woman and the second person to hold the post. She received Jamaica's Musgrave Gold Medal in 1999 and the Order of Distinction in 2013, the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in 2018, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019 and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. The Windham-Campbell citation praised poetry that bears witness to female embodiment, the colonial legacy, mortality and the sacred.

Goodison taught for many years at the University of Michigan, where she is Professor Emerita, and she holds honorary degrees from the University of the West Indies, the University of Toronto and the University of Durham. She also became the first non-British writer to be poet laureate of the Durham Book Festival. She lives in British Columbia with her husband, the scholar Ted Chamberlin, and in 2025 published a translation of Dante's Inferno into the Jamaican language she grew up with.