Liberia: Liberian Professor Wins Prestigious Poetry Award

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, a US-based Liberian professor of English, creative writing, and African literature at Penn State Altoona, has been selected as the 2023 recipient of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award from Saginaw Valley State University.

The Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize has been offered since 1968 on a triennial basis. The Prize is given for a book published in the previous three years that has made an important contribution to American poetry. The recipient must be a living American poet. The prize is awarded without regard to number of publications, age, gender, place of residence, style or type of poetry, or choice of subject matter; this award is not for total achievement, but for an individual book.

Three active and respected U.S. poets are named as judges, usually chosen by the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. No nominations are solicited or accepted. From 1968–2009, this triennial prize was awarded in the amount of $3,000. In 2011, the SVSU agreed to fund the prize and elevated the award to $10,000.

Three judges, selected by the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, were unanimous in their decision to award the $10,000 prize to Wesley for her 2020 collection "Praise Song for My Children: New and Collected Poems."

The prize is given for a book published in the previous three years that has made an important contribution to American poetry. Past recipients of the award include Howard Nemerov, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, Carl Phillips, and Douglas Kearney.

Wesley is invited to Saginaw Valley State University in March to engage in poetry-related activities on campus and to accept the award in person at an evening ceremony.

Wesley is the author of several critically acclaimed books of poetry and her poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction articles have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including “Harvard Review,” “Harvard Divinity Review,” “Transition,” “Prairie Schooner,” “The New York Times Magazine,” and “Cutthroat.”

Her poetry's attitude shifts between critical, bemused, revelatory, celebratory, and mournful, as she discusses both her American and Liberian lives. Wesley constantly makes the reader aware of her exile. The vantage point of being an outsider to both the United States and postwar Liberian cultures permits a wide-awake honesty and fresh analysis of cultures, politics, gender relations, and attitudes.

Wesley is a Liberian Civil War survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991, the author of six books of poetry and a children's book, as well as an anthology editor. The influences and inspires most of her work. She is Christian, and her work incorporates and refers frequently to biblical themes and passages.

She attained her BA at the University of Liberia, her MS at Indiana University, and her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University. She also operates her own popular blog, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's International Blog on Poetry for Peace, in which she tries to get readers to think "about the things that bother the world.