Brenda DoHarris

Who is Brenda DoHarris?

Brenda Chester DoHarris is a writer who was born and raised in British Guiana.

She is a professor of English at Bowie State University in Bowie, Maryland, and a graduate of Columbia University and Howard University, where she received a PhD in English. The first Guyanese woman to run in Guyana for office of presidency of a trades union, she became actively involved in the Guyanese political movement for democracy during the 1970s.

She has travelled widely in Africa, the Caribbean and China, where she attended the U.S./China Joint Conference on Women's Issues. Her area of scholarly interest is post-colonial women's literature.

Her novel The Coloured Girl in the Ring: A Guyanese Woman Remembers is a fictional exploration of a young Black woman's coming of age in British Guiana of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Told against the backdrop of political and racial turbulence, the novel employs a first-person narrative format and proffers a well-defined portrait of the main character's recollection of her family life, her oppressive school teachers, her friends' doomed inter-racial romance and her thoughts on race and identity.

Her latest novel, Calabash Parkway, is about Guyanese immigrant women in Brooklyn, New York, women who struggle against the odds to gain legal residence. It won the Guyana Prize for Literature.