Marion Bethel - Constitutional Amendments‏

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 and BIM.  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 5^th Annual St. Martin Book Fair in May 2007 as a guest poet and workshop presenter.  She was also a guest poet and presenter at The IV International Poetry Festival of Granada in Nicaragua in February 2008, The First International Poetry Festival of Bolivia in February 2010 and the !0^th International Poetry Festival of Venezuela in May 2013.

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.  She was also awarded 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.  The Rotary Club of Nassau Sunrise granted Ms. Bethel a Paul Harris Award in November 2012.  In July 2014, Ms. Bethel was awarded the Eleventh CARICOM Triennial Award for Women.

In April 2013, Ms. Bethel was a guest writer at the 3^rd Congress of Caribbean Writers in Guadeloupe.  She also attended the BOCAS Literary Festival in Trinidad in April 2013 as the Chief Judge of the Poetry category for the annual BOCAS prize.

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

In February 2013 Ms. Bethel completed a documentary film entitled Womanish Ways: Freedom, Human Rights & Democracy, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Bahamas – 1948-1962.  The film was screened at the Bahamas International Film Festival in December 2012, the Africa World Documentary Film Festival in Jamaica in April 2013 and the Urban Suburban Film Festival in Philadelphia in July 2013.  It won the award for the best documentary in the Urban Suburban Film Festival. In March 2012, the film was screened under the patronage of the Institute for Gender & development Studies, the Institute of Caribbean Studies and the English studies Department at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. The University of Toronto and Spelman College have also invited Ms. Bethel as a guest in the fall semester of 2013.  In February 2014 Ms. Bethel will be a guest at Mills College, Stanford University & University of California, Davis for the screening of the film.. There are several film festivals and other academic institutions that are presently considering the film for presentation.  The website for the film is www.womensuffragebahamas.com.