We honor the Jamaican scholar and writer Velma Pollard’s life and her invaluable contributions to Caribbean literary culture and education. She was retired from the University of the West Indies, Mona where she was Dean of the Faculty of Education. Over her decades of teaching in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the US, she trained many students, including J. Michael Dash and Victor Chang, who would go on to have their own lasting impact on Caribbean letters. Her scholarship explored the richness of Caribbean Creoles and Caribbean women’s writing. As she describes in a 2018 interview with Simona Bertacco, she considered herself “a teacher who writes” and her multiple poetry and short story collections influenced and inspired many. Her novella Karl won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1992.
You can read here Pollard’s interview with Bertacco, where she depicts her trajectory as a teacher and writer and emphasizes the importance of regional institutions such as the University of the West Indies as a heady gathering place for fellow Caribbean writers from whom she describes receiving constant encouragement. She was part of the generation of Caribbean students who graduated from UWI in the 1950s and who attended the institution during the time of the short-lived West Indian Federation. This shaped the vision and sense of the Caribbean as a cultural space that we see throughout her work. She also returned from studies in the US and Canada to teach at UWI for a major part of her career, contributing immensely to the life of the institution.
Here she is in conversation with Geraldine Skeete on the Caribbean literary podcast The Space Between Words founded and produced by the late Dr. Giselle Rampaul.
These other resources offer more insight into her prolific and inspiring career:
https://japoetryarchive.nlj.gov.jm/velma-pollard/
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/velma-pollard
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/blog/whappen/velma-pollard-1937-2025-tiday-fi-mi-tumaro-fi-yu
https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/03/jamaican-poet-velma-pollard
And, from our JWIL archives, here is Velma Pollard in conversation with fellow Jamaican intellectuals and UWI stalwarts Evelyn O’Callaghan and Betty Wilson at a West Indian Literature conference circa 1984.
Finally, we offer an excerpt from Velma’s own poem “Warner Woman Too” published in JWIL’s November 2006 festschrift issue for Edward Baugh, which is a fitting reflection on this somber moment:
I turn death columns every day
Stricken with fear
That I might find a face I know
eyes bright still
shining from the page
or worse that
“In Memoriam”
some friend
I thought had merely gone
last year
or year before to foreign
crying crime or the economy
(or both)
might sit there gazing
schoolgirl smile intact
(wearing the age she chose)
and almost wave at me
after the internal warner woman
whispered (sudden)
tapping on her arm
“your time now, dear”