Patricia Powell
- MIT Sponsors:
- Scholar Link:Visit Patricia Powell's website
- Scholar Link:Visit Patrica Powell's faculty page
The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been in the minority… It will take such a small committed minority to work unrelentingly to win the uncommitted majority. Such a group may transform America’s greatest dilemma into her most glorious opportunity.
Background
Patricia Powell is an author and recent Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University. Professor Powell earned a BA at Wellesley College and an MFA in creative writing: fiction from Brown University, where she studied with Michael Ondaatje, among others.
Interests
Powell writes and studies fiction and creative non-fiction, with themes exploring gender, race, sexuality, rejection, displacement, healing. Her novels have been described as often going “into territories underexamined in Caribbean literature and polarizing in Caribbean life.” Appearing in Powell’s work are “personal themes of rejection, displacement, and healing through the lives of highly varied characters, ranging from a gay Jamaican man dying of AIDS, to a cross-dressing Chinese woman immigrant to Jamaica, to Nanny, a heroine of Jamaican independence.”
Before her appointment at MIT, Powell participated in events at the Institute. In the spring of 1997, she presented at “Colored Girls with Pens: Writing by Women of Color,” a series of readings designed to showcase women-of-color authors. In 2002, Powell presented on a panel titled “Caribbean Women Artists: Expressing/Resisting Globalization,” a panel moderated by Prof. Odile Cazenave of the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department.
As an MLK visiting professor at MIT, Powell was hosted by the Writing Program. Her books Me Dying Trial and A Small Gathering of Bones were reissued by Beacon Press during the two-year visit.
