Born in the U.K. and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Douglas's writing navigates the complexities of everyday Jamaican life while also inventing and reinventing form in signature ways. Engaging with history and Jamaican reggae/dub traditions, her multi-genre work "creates a speculative ancestral project that samples and remixes the living and dead into a startling sonic fabric" (Whiting Foundation). A Creative Capital, Whiting Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she is the author of the novels, The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive: being dreamity, algoriddims, chants & riffs, The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: a novel in bass riddim (long-listed for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Prize), Notes from a Writer’s Book of Cures and Spells, Madam Fate and the poetry collection, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation). In addition to writing, Douglas and has performed a one-woman show, “Natural Herstory,” adapted from her fiction and exploring the lives of seven Jamaican women. Her most recent work, The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive, continues the innovative examination of Jamaica’s colonial past and speculative futures which has come to characterize her storytelling. Marcia Douglas is a College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

"I wish to write without borders."
— Marcia Douglas