Erna Brodber: Closing the Circle
"Born April 20, 1940 in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica, Erna Brodber grew up the daughter of a family acitve in the community affairs of their small town. She immersed herself in academia perhaps more than most other Caribbean authors, gaining a B.A. from the University College of the West Indies (now simply University of the West Indies) and ultimately attaining an M.Sc and Ph.D. She pursued many other professions before focusing on writing, including the posts of civil servant, teacher, sociology lecturer, and fellow/staff member of the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Mona, Jamaica. While at the ISER Brodber worked to collect the oral histories of elders in rural Jamaica, a project that would later inspire her novel Louisiana . "While studying as a young woman in the United States, Brodber encountered two powerful forces she had not previously been exposed to: the Black Power and Women's Liberation movements. Coupled with her ...