Marion Bethel

Marion Bethel was born and lives in Nassau, The Bahamas. She read law at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England and has worked as an attorney since 1986.

Her writing includes poetry, short stories and essays. Her work has appeared in Junction, an anthology of Bahamian prose and poetry, Lignum Vitae, a journal of the Bahamas Writers' Association, From The Shallow Seas, an anthology of Bahamian prose and poetry published by Casa de Las Americas, Habana, Cuba (1993), The Massachusetts Review, Autumn-Winter (1994), The Caribbean Writer, Volume 8 (1994) and Moving Beyond Boundaries, Volume 1, Pluto Press (1995). Her work has been accepted for publication in the following literary journals: Callaloo, River City, Poui, MaComere, The Hampden Sidney Poetry Review, Thamyris. She edited a special section of The Caribbean Writer Vol. 13, 1999 called Poetry from the Bahamas. This section was nominated for the Puschcart Prize.

Ms. Bethel has been a guest writer at several international events including the Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars Conference, Florida International University, Miami, Fla. in April 1996, the Miami International Book Fair in November 1997, the Caribbean Women Writers Series at Duke University, North Carolina in February 2002 and the XVI International Poetry Festival of Medellin in June 2006 in Medellin, Colombia. In June 2005 she began a three-part poetry workshop at Cave Canem, a Retreat for African American poets, held at the University of Pittsburgh. House of Nehesi Publishers invited Ms. Bethel to its 5th Annual St. Martin BookFair in May 2007 as a guest poet and workshop presenter. She was a guest poet and presenter at The IV International Poetry Festival of Granada invited her to Nicaragua to present her work in February 2008.

Ms Bethel was awarded a James Michener Fellowship by the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute in the Department of English of the University of Miami, Florida in July 1991 and the Casa de las Americas Prize for a volume of poetry called Guanahani, My Love which was published in a bilingual edition (Spanish/English) in 1995. From September 1997 to August 1998 she was the Alice Proskauer Poetry Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. In October and December 2006 she was a guest writer at the International Writers Workshop at the Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong.

Ms. Bethel's book, Guanahani, My Love, was re-published in March 2009 by House of Nehesi Publishers St.Martin, Caribbean. Her new poetry collection, Bougainvillea Ringplay, will be published in August 2009 by Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, England. She is now working on a third manuscript of poetry and a novel.