Donna Mae Jackson is a career Students Services and Development practitioner with a penchant for the arts, particularly creative writing. She is a trained communications specialist with years of experience writing, producing and coordinating artistic work. She has explored the spectrum of literary genres. Her poems have been featured in the Daily Gleaner, including “Mother Dearest” which was selected as poem of the week. As a playwright, she has produced works for school and church, and has coordinated musicals at the Residence Hall which she manages. Her captivating prose may be discovered in her novella “Touching the Corners of My Memory,” or her short stories which won her silver and bronze medals in the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission creative writing competition. From the nostalgia of her childhood in rural Jamaica, to the demands of student development in a diverse and dynamic urban tertiary environment, to her travels across the Caribbean, North America, the Middle East, Africa, and South America - her work has been inspired by a veritable potpourri of rich and vivacious experiences.

Her passion for volunteerism and development has seen her serving consecutive years as President of the Crofts Hill Past Students Association, whilst also undertaking various projects in her church community. She is the founder and convener of the On the Corner Summer School, the Gilda Jackson Foundation, and the It Takes a Village program. Adding to her wide range of activities, she is also a lay preacher and motivational speaker. Donna approaches her writing with the same kind of passion and punctilious care that she gives to her flourishing bed of orchids. She nurtures each idea, image, thought, character – bringing them to life as they flow from her pen, shaping them for the lasting impact they’ll have on her readers. Her honest, eloquent and picturesque style, like amber, fossilizes some person, some moment, some experience, some idea which can be lived and relived each time her work is recited, read, or staged.