Lorna Goodison

In July 2022, she received an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Letters) from Durham University.

Goodison's most recent collection of poems, Mother Muse, was published in June 2021, when Ben Wilkinson wrote in The Guardian: "Her writing is often a celebration of the spirit and tenacity of women; in various ways, Mother Muse ... extends this feature of her work." Mother Muse "orbits around two important 'mother' figures in Jamaican music: Sister Mary Ignatius, the nun who ran Kingston's Alpha Boys School, celebrated for nurturing musical talent; and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood, a celebrated dancer and lover of ill-fated musician Don Drummond — who was an Alpha Boys alumnus. Other poems contemplate, celebrate, and elegise woman ranging from the famous to the tragic to the unknown."

In 2020, Goodison was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2019, she was appointed Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Mona campus.

Goodison was announced in December 2019 as recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, which was presented to her at Buckingham Palace in March 2020.

Goodison's collection of essays, Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures, was published in 2018 by Myriad Editions – "a gathering of people, voices, stories, and the fruits of great labor", as characterised by SX Salon. The book featured in The Observer as one of "20 classic books by writers of colour", being chosen by Margaret Busby.

In March 2018, Yale University announced Goodison as one of eight recipients (the others being Lucas Hnath, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Bakewell, Olivia Laing, John Keene. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Cathy Park Hong) of a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, honouring writers for their literary achievement or promise and awarding them each a US$165,000 individual prize to support their writing.

Since 2017, Goodison has worked with dub poet and martial arts trainer Cherry Natural (born Marcia Wedderburn) to host a series of summer workshops pairing poetry and self-defence for girls aged from nine to 17, held at the Institute of Jamaica.

On 17 May 2017, Goodison was invested as the second official poet laureate of Jamaica, after Mervyn Morris, becoming the first woman to hold the title. She marked her first Emancipation Day in the role with a poem "In Celebration of Emancipation", which commemorates the end of enslavement of African peoples in Jamaica. She has said: "I don't think it is an accident that I was born on the first of August, and I don't think it was an accident that I was given the gift of poetry, so I take that to mean that I am to write about those people and their condition, and I will carry a burden about what they endured and how they prevailed until the day I die."

On 6 August 2013, Goodison was awarded the Jamaican national honour of the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander (CD), "for outstanding achievements in Literature and Poetry".

Her memoir, From Harvey River, was published in 2008, and was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in May 2009, read by Doña Croll. The review by Lisa Fugard in The New York Times concluded: "Goodison's praise songs can be found in her many volumes of poetry and now in this loving memoir. It's a legacy that can be traced back to her infancy, when Goodison's mother dipped her finger in sugar and rubbed it under her daughter's tongue, ensuring her the gift of sweet speech."

Her work has appeared widely in magazines, has been translated into many languages and over the past 25 years has been included in such major anthologies as Daughters of Africa (1992), The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003), the HarperCollins World Reader, the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature (2006).

In the early 1990s, Goodison began teaching part of the year at various North American universities, including the University of Toronto and at the University of Michigan, where she was the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies.

Goodison has also published three collections of short stories, Baby Mother and the King of Swords (1990), Fool-Fool Rose Is Leaving Labour-in-Vain Savannah (2005), and By Love Possessed (2012).

Tamarind Season was followed in 1986 by I Am Becoming My Mother, for which Goodison received the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Americas. Her subsequent poetry collections include Heartease (published in 1988, and described by Velma Pollard as "the uncovering for us of a spirit that has looked for, and found, a place"), Poems (1989), Selected Poems (1992), To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (1995), Turn Thanks (1999), Guinea Woman (2000), Travelling Mercies (2001), Controlling the Silver (2005), Goldengrove (2006), Oracabessa (2013) and Supplying Salt and Light (2013). Oracabessa won the Poetry category of the 2014 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

Goodison's first book to be published was the 1980 volume of poems Tamarind Season, and speaking of how it came about she has said: "I was writing these poems, and some people began to take notice. Like Neville Dawes, who was the head of the Institute of Jamaica. At the time, I was working at an advertising agency where everybody was moonlighting as an artist. After I finished writing copy, I would spend time in my office writing poems."

Lorna Gaye Goodison CD (born 1 August 1947) is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer of the generation born after World War II. She divides her time between Jamaica and Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, having served as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, succeeding Mervyn Morris. In 2019, she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

One of nine siblings – including journalist, author, playwright Barbara Gloudon (1935–2022) – Goodison is married to author and retired English literature professor J. Edward (Ted) Chamberlin and they live in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.