Beverlee Patton

Beverlee Patton’s writing reflects her 8 decades as a dancer, African-American, international program manager, and global traveler.

Keep Eyes Behind - A Mystery, which will be available through Mainspring Foundations Publishing in early 2025, reflects her interest in the brave stories of children living as refugees due to violence in their homeland, and the resilience they can find when they connect with and follow their intuition.

She is also the author of Noble Passing and Someone's Got To Do It, which was supported by a writer in-residence grant from the Morris Graves Foundation. Sapelo Time Is Winding Up, a play co-written with Diane Ferlatte, was commissioned by and performed during San Francisco Festival 2000. She has also written numerous short stories and performance pieces for adults and children and she is currently working on her memoir, a work in progress, titled: Tales of a High Yellow Octogenarian with Good Hair.

Her Story

Beverlee grew up experiencing racism during the Jim Crow era when housing in the San Francisco Bay Area was unavailable to her single mother, Patton was often boarded out and moved from coast to coast, city to city, school to school. The constant moving expanded her world view, rather than diminishing her spirit. After graduating from UCLA she taught modern dance in a high school and then won the John Hay Whitney Dancer’s Award for postgraduate study at Juilliard. Her belief in the principle of the oneness of humankind led to further graduate study and into the international field, where she lived for twenty-five years in Grenada, India, Nepal and Namibia. In her last post in Windhoek, Namibia she served as the US Peace Corps Associate Director of Education where she supported US Volunteer teacher trainers collaborating with local teachers in Black communities who had been deprived of basic education during apartheid.

Her Writing

To pre-order her book Keep Eyes Behind - A Mystery, click here

To read her earlier work click here