Mary Adella Wolcott

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Mary Adella Wolcott ({{date|13 November 1879|MDY}} – ?) was a Jamaican poet who wrote under the pen name Tropica.

Mary Adella Wolcott was born on {{date|13 November 1879|MDY}} in St. Mary's, Jamaica, the daughter of white American missionaries Henry Berdin Wolcott and Sarah Boardman Paddock.{{Cite book |last=Wolcott |first=Chandler |url=http://archive.org/details/wolcottgenealogy00wolc |title=Wolcott genealogy : the family of Henry Wolcott, one of the first settlers of Windsor, Conn. |date=1912 |publisher=Rochester, N.Y. : Genese Press |others=Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center}} Her grandfather, a white American Baptist missionary named Seth Taylor Wolcott, purchased an estate named Richmond in Saint Mary Parish and created a small manual labor school for blacks. Her father had been disinterested in Richmond and in 1941 she unsuccessfully attempted to engage the Jamaican government in creating "an industrial school, a baby Tuskegee".{{cite book | url=https://archive.org/details/contentiousliber0000kenn/page/146/ | isbn=978-0-8203-3399-1 | title=Contentious liberties : American abolitionists in post-emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866 | date=2010 | last1=Kenny | first1=Gale L. | publisher=University of Georgia Press }}

Wolcott attended Oberlin Academy in Oberlin, Ohio from 1896 to 1898Ancestry.com, U.S., School Catalogs, 1765-1935, Oberlin College 1908, page 1078. and graduated from the Drexel Institute Library School in 1908.{{Cite book |last1=American Library Association |url=http://archive.org/details/libraryjournal32ameruoft |title=Library journal |last2=Library Association |date=1876 |publisher=New York, R.R. Bowker [etc.] |others=Robarts - University of Toronto}}

Wolcott published a single volume of poetry, The Island of Sunshine. Her work romanticizes plantation-era Jamaica from an ethnographic and colonial perspective. Her "Nana" is an elegy for a black nanny and her disappearing cultural traditions, while "Busha's Song" frames an overseer as the pastor of the plantation.{{Cite book |last1=Donnell |first1=Alison |url=http://archive.org/details/routledgereaderi00donn |title=The Routledge reader in Caribbean literature |last2=Lawson Welsh |first2=Sarah |date=1996 |publisher=London; New York : Routledge |others=The Archive of Contemporary Music |isbn=978-0-415-12048-7}} Her work was later anthologized by J. E. Clare McFarlane.

In 1923, Wolcott was a founder of the Jamaica Poetry League, an offshoot of the Empire Poetry League.{{Cite book |last=Delia Jarrett-Macauley |url=http://archive.org/details/lifeofunamarson100jarr |title=The life of Una Marson, 1905-65 |date=1998 |publisher=Manchester University Press |others=Internet Archive |isbn=978-0-7190-5284-2}}