Jamaica grew up in Santa Cruz, CA. She earned her B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Pacific University. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Prairie Schooner, Guernica, The Adroit Journal,World Literature Today, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, the 2019 winner of the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Contest in Poetry, and a 2020 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize Runner Up. Her work has been supported by Hedgebrook, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Jamaica currently lives in Lincoln, NE where she is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry), African Diasporan Literature, and Women and Gender Studies.
