ABSTRACT
Mordecai was born in Kingston, Jamaica, the second of five children. She went to Convent of Mercy Alpha from 1946 to 1959, then to Newton College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, where she received her bachelor of arts degree in English in 1963. She returned to Jamaica in 1963 to teach, first in high school, then at Mico, Jamaica’s largest teachers college. At Mico, she was motivated to write poems for children when she discovered that the trainee teachers could find few Caribbean poems to use in their teaching-practice lessons.
