Born in Jamaica and educated there and in the USA, Pamela ('Pam') Mordecai and her family immigrated to Canada in 1994. A former language arts teacher with a PhD in English, she was for fourteen years publications officer in the Faculty of Education, UWI, Mona, and publications editor of the Caribbean Journal of Education. The author of over thirty books including textbooks, five children's books, nine collections of poetry, a reference work on Jamaica (with her late husband, Martin) called Culture and Customs of Jamaica, a collection of short fiction, Pink Icing (available from ECW as an audiobook) and a novel, Red Jacket, shortlisted for the 2015 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In fall, 2026, Goose Lane Editions will publish Two Days in Mayaro, her second collection of short stories. Her poetry and prose fiction appear in numerous journals, as well as in major anthologies of Caribbean and African-Canadian literature. Her writing for children and adults is represented in anthologies and textbooks on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in West and South Africa, India, Pakistan and Malaysia. Her poems are part of the Canada's Poetry in Voice and the UK's Poetry Out Loud initiatives. She has a strong interest in promoting the writing of Caribbean women and has edited and co-edited ground-breaking anthologies of Caribbean writing. In 2010 her play, El Numero Uno had its world premiere at the Loraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People and, in March 2017, its Caribbean premiere at the Edna Manley School for the Performing and Visual Arts. She has read at major festivals including the International Festival of Authors (Toronto), the Miami International Bookfair and Serbia's Smederevo Poet Autumn. In spring 2014, she was a fellow at Yaddo artists' community in upstate New York (yaddo.org). She lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is represented by Tranatlantic Literary Agency.