Pamela Mordecai

Pamela Claire Mordecai (born 1942 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a scholar, poet, playwright and writer of long and short fiction. She attended high school in Jamaica and Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Newton, MA, 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, a novel, and (with her husband, Martin Mordecai) a reference work on Jamaica.[1] She has edited several anthologies, including the Sunsong series. Her poems and stories for children are widely collected and have been used in textbooks in the UK, Canada, the US, West Africa, the Caribbean and Malaysia. Her short stories have been published in journals and anthologies in the Caribbean, the US and Canada. Her play El Numero Uno had its world premiere at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People in February 2010 in Toronto, Canada.

Mordecai has lived in Canada since 1994, but the Caribbean experience, both in the region and in the diaspora, continues to be an important preoccupation in her writing. In 2013 she was awarded a Bronze Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica.[2] In spring, 2014, she was a fellow at Yaddo[3] artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Pamela and her husband and three children migrated to Canada in 1993. She lives in Kitchener, Ontario.