Collection: Gwyneth Barber Wood

Gwyneth Barber Wood arrived as a quiet but distinctive new voice in Jamaican and Caribbean poetry, with a gift for vividly detailed yet compressed narratives that say as much as short stories many times their length, of telling detail and striking metaphor. Sadly, Gwyneth Barber Wood died, far too young, in 2006. Gwyneth Barber Wood began writing as a young adult and has been making her way in poetry through workshops with Wayne Brown, poet and editor for The Jamaica Observer, Arts Section, where her poems appear regularly. In 1999 she placed third for poetry in the Jamaica Observer Arts Section Awards. The following year, she was awarded the bronze medal and merit certificate for two poems in the JCDC Literary Awards competition. A two time fellow of the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts (VCCA), spring 2001 and 2003, she was among the poets invited to read at the Calabash International Literary Festival in 2001 hosted by Jake’s on the south coast of Jamaica. Some of her poems are included in the 2000/2001/2002 anthologies Bearing Witness, published by the Jamaica Observer and edited by Wayne Brown, and in the 2002 Spring issue of Artemis Journal, the online issue of poetrymagazine.com, March 2003 and The Caribbean Writer, an anthology published by the University of the Virgin Islands.