Beverley Bryan


Beverley Bryan is a retired Jamaican academic who was a professor of language education at the University of the West Indies in Mona.

Early life

Bryan was born in Portland, Jamaica, but immigrated to England at an early age as part of the "Windrush generation". She and her parents settled in Brixton, London, which had a large Afro-Caribbean community. Bryan studied teaching at Keele University, Staffordshire, and moved back to Brixton to teach at a primary school. Bryan later undertook further studies at the University of London, graduating with a B.A. in English, an M.A. and Ph.D. in language education. She was a member of the British Black Panthers in the early 1970s, and later helped found the Black Women's Group, which shared similar radical views.
She co-authored with Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe the book The Heart of the Race, published in 1985 by Virago and reissued in 2018 by Verso.

Career

In 1992, Bryan moved back to Jamaica to join the University of the West Indies as a lecturer in educational studies. She was promoted to senior lecturer in 2002 and to professor in 2011, and served as head of the Department of Educational Studies. Bryan is a leading authority on Jamaican Creole learners of English, and has worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Education on language policy. She has also advised other Caribbean governments on literacy policies, as well as serving as a member of the United Nations Literacy Decade Experts' Group. She was one of the founders of the Caribbean Poetry Project, a collaboration between UWI and the University of Cambridge which aims to increase the visibility of Caribbean writers in the UK.