Liberian-American Wesley wins Roethke Memorial Poetry prize

Altona Professor, Patricia Wesley has won the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize.

Wesley is a Professor of English, creative writing and African Literature at Penn State, the US.

The Liberian-American will get $10,000 prize for her 2020 collection “Praise Song for My Children: New and collected Poems.”

Announcing the award on its website, the Penn State wrote; “the prize is given for a book published in the previous three yeas 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 will in 2023 go to Saginaw Valley State University in March to engage in poetry-related activities on campus and to accept the award in person,” It added.

Patrici Jabbeh Wesley

Professor Patricia Wesley immigrated to the United States with her family during the 14-year Liberian civil war, a war that has helped shape her writing as a Diaspora African woman writer in the United States. For more than two decades, Wesley’s poetry has given voice to the voiceless, the hundreds of thousands of Liberian war dead through its exploration of themes on the plight of the refugee of war, the new African Diaspora mother/wife and African femininity, motherhood, home, displacement, and the survivor as witness.

African scholar and literary critic, Chielozona Eze describes Wesley as ‘one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century.’

Also Kwame Dawes, poet and founder of the African Poetry Book Series, described her as ‘a poet at the height of her skills and at the height of her clarity about the world and what things must be spoken into it.’

Wesley is the author of six books of poetry: Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, Becoming Ebony, and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa.

She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea, (One Moore Books, 2012). Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011, featured poem. Most recently, that same poem was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as the New York Times Magazine featured poem on June 7, 2020.

Wesley has dozens of individual poems and memoir articles anthologised and published in literary magazines, including Harvard Review, Transition, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Divinity Review, Prairie Schooner, among others, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Finnish, and Hebrew.

The Roethke Poetry Prize
Saginaw Valley State University said; “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.

VON