Member Profile

Born in Jamaica and educated there and in the USA, Pamela ('Pam') Mordecai and her family immigrated to Canada in 1994. A former language arts teacher with a PhD in English, she was for fourteen years editor of the Caribbean Journal of Education. The author of over thirty books including textbooks, children's books, six collections of poetry, a reference work on Jamaica (with her husband, Martin), a collection of short fiction and a novel, her creative and critical writing appears in numerous journals, as well as in major anthologies of Caribbean and African-Canadian literature. Her writing for children and adults is represented in anthologies and textbooks on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in West Africa and Malaysia. She has a strong interest in promoting the writing of Caribbean women and has edited and co-edited ground-breaking anthologies of their writing.  In 2010 her play, El Numero Uno had its world premiere at the Loraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People and, in March 2017, its Caribbean premiere at the Edna Manley School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She has read at major festivals including the International Festival of Authors (Toronto) and the Miami Inernational Bookfair. In spring 2014, she was a fellow at Yaddo artists' community in upstate New York (yaddo.org). She lives with her husband in Kitchener, Ontario.