Background on Zee Edgell
Zelma (Zee) Inez Edgell, nee Tucker, was born on October 21, 1940, on Cleghorn Street, in Belize City, the part of British Honduras (now Belize), to Clive A. Tucker and Veronica Tucker (nee Walker). She was raised in a family of nine children amid the country’s growing nationalist and anti-colonial sentiments. Educated at Holy Redeemer Primary School and St. Catherine Academy, Edgell began developing a political and race-conscious attitude about Belizean socio-political practices. This awareness later shaped her literary voice and lifelong engagement with the multi-layered issues that permeated the country’s history.
In pursuit of cultivating her educational praxis, she attended Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London, where she received a diploma in Journalism in 1965. Edgell credited her foundation in journalism as having contributed to her understanding of the universality of human behavior and emotions. She eventually commenced a successful career in journalism, which took her to Jamaica as a reporter for The Daily Gleaner. She later founded the Belizean newspaper called The Reporter in 1967 in Belize City. Edgell met her husband, Alvin George Edgell, shortly after, who was stationed in Belize with the developmental agency CARE. The couple married in Belize in 1968 and remained devoted partners until Alvin’s passing in May 2020. Edgell and her husband had two children, Holly (1969) and Randall (1975). Shortly after the youngest’s birth, Alvin’s work led the family to Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Somalia. During this time of international travel, Edgell began working on her first novel, Beka Lamb. These global experiences greatly influenced Edgell’s worldview and writing, thus helping to shape her creative mind. Her distance from Belize subsequently gave her a renewed and sharpened perspective on the country—its physicality, culture, and socio-political dynamics, all of which she factiously detailed in her first novel.
Zee Edgell wrote four novels over a span of 25 years, during which she built a thriving academic career as a professor of English. She first taught briefly, in two stints, at her alma mater, Saint Catherine Academy, in the 1960s and 1980s. She also served as a lecturer at the University College of Belize from 1988 to 1989. Edgell later became a tenured professor of English at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where she taught until her retirement in 2009. In 2005, she earned a master’s degree in liberal studies from Kent State. Her role as a professor provided her with the opportunity to mentor and guide other young writers, fostering their creative writing sensibility. In recognizing her distinctive contribution to the field of literature, she received an honorary doctorate in literature at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, after her retirement in 2009. Though no longer with us, Zee Edgell’s legacy lives on through her words, her teaching, and her international impact. The Black Feminist Archive is committed to preserving and amplifying her voice, illuminating her contributions to the development of Belizean literature and the broader global canon of Black women writers. From founding a women’s workshop and reading group in Bangladesh to her filling the minds of inquisitive young writers, Zee Edgell’s vision and impact remains relevant, felt, and necessary for Belize and the world.
