Fruits opal palmer adisa biography

Jamaican and American novelist (born 1954)

Opal Palmer Adisa (born 6 November 1954) is a Jamaican and American poet, novelist, performance artist and educator.^[1] Anthologized in more than 400 publications, she has been a regular performer of her work internationally.^[2] Professor Emeritus at California College of the Arts, Adisa is also the current Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica, where she currently resides.

Early life

Adisa was raised ten miles outside Kingston, Jamaica, and attended school in the capital. In 1970 she went to study at Hunter College, New York, and in 1979 moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue an MA in creative writing.^[3] As noted by David Katz, "Adisa’s work has been greatly informed by her childhood experience of life on a sugar estate in the Jamaican countryside, where her father worked as a chemist and he