Author of the Children’s Picture Book, In Monrovia, The River Visits The Sea.
Ardea Herodias Books is working with Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley to release a second edition of In Monrovia, The River Visits the Sea in 2026.
Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a poet, memoirist, fiction writer, anti-war/human rights activist, and a war survivor, who immigrated with her family to the US during the 14 year Liberian civil war. She is the author of many books of poetry, including, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, The River is Rising, and Where the Road Turns. Dr. Jabbeh Wesley has also published dozens of individual
poems, memoir articles, and short stories in numerous literary magazines and anthologies, including in Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner Magazine, Harvard’s Transition Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her poetry has been translated and published in languages such as Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. In 2023, she edited and published a 340 page collection of poetry, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, which is the most comprehensive volume of any literature from Liberia since 1847 with University of Nebraska Press. The book was named as one of 100 Notable Books in African Literature in 2023.
An Internationally invited writer and speaker, Dr. Wesley has also won numerous awards and prizes, including, the 2022 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize of $10,000 for her sixth collection of poetry, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, the 2022 Levinson Prize from Poetry Foundation, for two poems, “Healing Will Come,” and “Black Woman Selling Her Home in America,” a 2021 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner Magazine for her Poems, “My Name is Dawanyeno” and “When My Husband Prayed,” and a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second collection, Becoming Ebony. In May of 2026, Jabbeh Wesley’s next book of poems, which is a 434 page collection, entitled, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Collected Poems, 1998-2020, will be released from the University of Nebraska Press. That book was listed by Publishers Weekly as a Spring 2026 Top 10 books of poetry. She is Professor of English, Creative Writing and African Literature at Penn State-Altoona, and lives in Central Pennsylvania.
Explore Other Books by Dr. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley:
