After the Memorial

Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family during the fourteen year Liberian civil war. She is the author of five books of poetry: When the Wanderers Come Home (2016), Where the Road Turns (2010), The River is Rising (2007), Becoming Ebony, (2003) and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1998). She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea (2012). Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011 featured poem. Patricia has won several awards and grants, including a 2016 WISE Women Award from Blair County, Pennsylvania, 2011 President’s Award from the Blair County NAACP, the 2010 Liberian Award for her poetry and her mentorship of young Liberians in the Diaspora, a Penn State University AESEDA Collaborative Grant for her research on Liberian Women’s Trauma stories from the Civil War, a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book of poems, a World Bank Fellowship, among others. Her poems have been nominated twice for the Pushcart Awards. Her individual poems and memoir articles have been anthologized and published in literary magazines in the U.S., in South America, Africa and Europe, and her work has been translated in Italian, Spanish, and Finnish. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University.