Breaking the Silence is the first comprehensive collection of literature from Liberia since before the nation's independence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has gathered work from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders. In this collection, Liberia's founding settlers wrestle with their identity as African free slaves in the homeland from which their ancestors were captured, and writers of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries find themselves navigating a landscape at odds with itself.
From poets of Liberia's past to young writers of the present, the contributors to this volume celebrate the beauty of their nation while mourning the devastation of a long, bloody civil war.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a professor of English, creative writing, and African literature at Pennsylvania State University-Altoona. She immigrated to the United States with her husband and children in 1991, during the Liberian civil war. Wesley is the winner of the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation and is the author of six collections of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize; Becoming Ebony, a 2002 Crab Orchard Award winner; and When the Wanderers Come Home (Nebraska, 2016). She is a founder of Young Scholars of Liberia.