The Center for Poetry & Poetics is pleased to announce its first event of the academic year: the poet Lorna Goodison will be coming to UVA to give a reading at the UVA Bookstore on Tuesday, September 17th at 7:00pm.

The first female Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2017-2020), Lorna Goodison has won many awards for her work including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems, Supplying Salt and Light, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems, Controlling the Silver, Traveling Mercies, Heartease, and Tamarind Season. She is also the author of the short story collections By Love Possessed, Fool-fool Rose is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah, and Baby Mother and the King of Swords. Her memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People, won the BC (British Columbia) National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and was a finalist for both the Trillium Book Award and the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. She won Daily News Prize in 1997 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her second book of poetry, I am Becoming My Mother. Her work is also featured in numerous anthologies, including the Longman Anthology of British Literature, the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. Lorna Goodison is Professor Emerita at University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.