Contact:  Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 920/832-6590
For Immediate Release	                       January 18, 1999

Jamaican-Born Author Conducts Fiction Reading at Lawrence University  


     APPLETON, WIS. -- Author Patricia Powell explores the universal themes
of race and power, gender and desire against the backdrop of Chinese
immigration to Jamaica in the late 1800s during a fiction reading at
Lawrence University.
     Powell will read from her third and latest novel, "The Pagoda" at
Lawrence's Wriston Art Center auditorium Wednesday, Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m.
The event is free and open to the public.  A reception and book signing will
follow the reading.
     "The Pagoda" follows a Chinese shopkeeper, Lowe, who flees China in the
1890s to seek a better life in Jamaica, where slavery had just ended.  Lowe
finds a land where the Chinese are not welcomed by either whites or blacks,
forcing her to disguise herself as a man and become husband to a
light-skinned black lesbian.  Through letters to an estranged daughter, Lowe
provides a confession and an explanation for her masquerade of life,
revealing her childhood in China, her journey across the ocean and her hope
for her daughter and future generations to find the sense of belonging that
has been beyond her grasp.
     Publisher's Weekly called "The Pagoda" a "lush historical work...that
opens a door onto an exotic, imaginary world where sex roles and racial
tensions are tossed aside in the struggle to belong, and at the same time,
to cling to ancestral traditions."
     Born in Jamaica, Powell lived there until she was 16 when she emigrated
to the United States.  Currently the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at
Harvard University, Powell is the author of two previous novels, "Me Dying
Trial" (1993) and "A Small Gathering of Bones." (1994).  She earned a
bachelor's degree from Wellesley College and a masterŐs of fine arts in
creative writing from Brown University.