Poet best known for her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman, which took the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has since published more than a dozen of award winning collections of poems and short stories.
She earned a degree in communications from the University of Guyana and spent the years following working as a Teacher and Journalist until she moved to the United Kingdom in 1977.
Outside of her poetry, she also released a novel in 1986 titled Whole of a Morning Sky.
She was born and raised in Georgetown, Guyana but eventually settled in Lewes, England with her partner and fellow poet John Agard.
In 2011, she was a judge on the panel of the Anthologise poetry competition, an event captained by poetry contemporary Carol-Ann Duffy.
