Marion Bethel

Marion Bethel (born July 31,1953) is an attorney, poet, essayist, and writer from Nassau, The Bahamas. Bethel currently resides in Nassau, The Bahamas with her husband Alfred Sears and is involved in political activism in civil society in The Bahamas.

Further reading

She was born there and was educated at the University of Valencia, at McGill University and at Columbia University. Bethel began teaching in the Bahamas and became a lecturer at the College of The Bahamas. She studied law at Cambridge University, passed her bar exams in September 1984, was admitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 1985 and has practised law in the Bahamas since 1986.

Her collection of poems Guanahani, My Love received the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1995. In 1997, Bethel was named the Alice Proskauer Poetry Fellow at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. In 2009, the second edition of Guanahani, My Love by Marion Bethel was published by House of Nehesi Publishers in 2009. Her second collection of poems Bougainvillea Ringplay was published in 2009.

In 2012, she directed Womanish Ways: Freedom, Human Rights & Democracy, the Women’s Suffrage Movement in The Bahamas 1948 to 1962, a documentary on the struggle to gain women the right to vote in the Bahamas. The film won the 2012 Award in Documentary at the Urban Suburban International Film Festival in Philadelphia.