Penn State Altoona professor signs contract for children’s book reissue

ALTOONA, Pa. - Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, professor of English at Penn State Altoona, signed a book contract with Panhandle Creek Press for the reissue of her children's book, "In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea," originally published in 2012.

The book was inspired by Wesley's years of growing up in Monrovia, a city that is surrounded by the Atlantic's seashore and the Mesurado River, which flowed behind her childhood home and her later home, built just before the Liberian civil war. The river is a symbolic image that runs through all of Wesley's poetry collections. The reissued book will feature a new hard-back design and a new illustrator. It will be released in December 2026.

Several of Jabbeh Wesley's poems were also recently featured in literary journals. "I Come from A Country Where Women Are Told to Shut Up," "We Got this Far," and "Thursdays," in "Callaloo, A Journal of the African Diaspora;" and "Belonging," and "Let's Laugh Anyway," in the twentieth anniversary edition of "Cutthroat."