Altoona professor is featured speaker, has work nominated for award

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, will be featured in the 55th annual Poetry International Festival in the Netherlands. The event will take place June 12 through 15, 2025, at three festival venues, including LantarenVenster, Verhalenhuis “House of stories” Belvédère and Theater Zuidplein.

Credit: Penn State

ALTOONA, Pa. — Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, was a featured speaker for the University of Wah in Pakistan's Lecture Series of Foreign English Professors webinar on Aug. 16. She presented “The Beauty and Challenges of Writing African Literature in the Diaspora.”

Also, Wesley's poem "The Year of Insanity: to 2017,” published this summer in The Summerset Review, was nominated for a Best of the Net Award. Two other poems, “In the Other World” and “Flying,” were accepted to be published in the Pittsburgh online magazine Vox Populi.

Further, several young aspiring Liberian poets mentored by Jabbeh Wesley through her nonprofit organization, Young Scholars of Liberia, had their poems published in an anniversary issue of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. Their poems were featured along with Jabbeh Wesley’s poem, “I Come from a Country that Eats its Young.”

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