Pamela Powell is an essayist, children’s author, memoirist, and writing teacher.

Her work has appeared in the anthologies Steady As She Goes: Women’s Adventures At Sea, At Home On Fidalgo, ICE: Poems For Children, and Filtered Images: Women Remembering Their Grandmothers, as well as Sail Magazine, The Annapolis Capitol, and Kennebec: A Portfolio of Maine Writing. Her children’s novel, The Turtle Watchers, was published by Viking/Penguin and translated in Danish, Spanish, and Japanese. She recently completed a memoir entitled Sea Change.

She attended Wesleyan University, graduated from Goddard College, and holds an M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts. She participated in the Under the Volcano masters writing residency in 2003 and 2023, a Millay Colony for the Arts residency in 1991, and has been an author-in-residence in the Boston Public Schools, the Arlington MA, public schools, the Eugene OR public schools, and Buckingham Browne & Nichols.

Pamela became a licensed boat captain at age twenty-one, commanding ferry boats out of Boston and Annapolis. She sailed on charter boats in the Caribbean from 1984 to 1988. She was a boat captain and seamanship instructor for Outward Bound at Hurricane Island, Maine, Thompson Island, Massachusetts, and Pacific Crest Outward Bound, Washington, from 1989 to 2003.

She lives in Charlotte, Vermont, on the traditional territory of the Abenaki Nation.