Pamela Mordecai

Who is Pamela Mordecai?

Pamela Claire Mordecai is a Jamaican teacher, scholar, poet and writer of short fiction. She attended high school in Jamaica and college in the US, where she did a first degree in English. A trained language-arts teacher with a PhD in English, she has taught at secondary and tertiary levels, trained teachers, edited an academic journal, and worked in media and in publishing.

Mordecai has written articles on Caribbean literature, education and publishing, and has collaborated on, or herself written, over thirty books, including textbooks, children’s books, five books of poetry for adults, a collection of short fiction, and a reference work on Jamaica. She has edited several anthologies. Her poems and stories for children are widely collected and have been used in textbooks in the UK, Canada, the US, West Africa and the Caribbean. Her short stories have been published in journals and anthologies in the Caribbean, the US and Canada.

Mordecai has lived in Canada since 1994, but the Caribbean experience, both in the region and in the diaspora, continues to be the focus of her writing.