Dr. Paulette Ann Meikle has spent decades moving between the Caribbean, the American South, and the Pacific, studying communities, teaching students, and painting canvases she gives away. Her book The Journey draws on all of it: the sociology, the art, the faith, and the landscapes that shaped her understanding of how people and places hold each other together.
Houston Texas, 4/30/2026 — Paulette Ann Meikle has a habit of giving her paintings away. She paints them in her studio, landscapes and florals and pieces rooted in the natural world, and then she hands them to family, friends, colleagues, or whoever she thinks needs something beautiful on their wall. She has donated dozens of works through an effort she calls Art with a Purpose, raising thousands of dollars for scholarship funds at Delta State University and for charities across Tennessee and Arkansas.
She does not sell most of them. She gives them.
That instinct, to make something and then release it into the world as an act of connection rather than commerce, runs through nearly everything Meikle has done in a career that has taken her from Jamaica, where she was born, through the University of the West Indies, Mississippi State University, Delta State University, the University of the Philippines, and the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith, where she has served as Associate Dean and Professor of Sociology.
Now she has written a book. It is called The Journey, and it is the place where the sociology, the painting, the teaching, the faith, and the four decades of crossing oceans finally converge on the same page.
A career built across three oceans
Meikle’s academic path alone would fill a conventional biography. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Mississippi State University, where she also taught. She served as Department Chair, Professor of Sociology and Community Development, and Director of the Center for Community and Economic Development at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, before moving to the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith as Associate Dean and Professor. Her research has been published in Community Development, the Journal of Rural Social Sciences, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, the Journal of Extension, and Caribbean Geography, among others, with additional work appearing through Sage, Emerald, and Nova Science.
But a list of appointments and journals doesn’t explain the person. What explains Meikle is the movement: the fact that she has taught and studied on four islands and two continents, that her work in community development and racial and gender equity has been shaped by the specific textures of the Mississippi Delta, the Jamaican countryside, the Filipino coast, and the Arkansas River Valley. She has spent her career listening to what she describes as the quiet intelligence of people and place.
What the book actually is
The Journey is not an academic text. It is a work of poetry and reflection that weaves together the threads of Meikle’s life: her faith, her scholarship, her painting, and her experience as a Jamaican born woman who has lived and worked in communities across the Global South and the American South. The book is structured around themes of connection, resilience, and renewal, and it treats the natural world as both subject and teacher.
Nature is central to everything Meikle makes. She describes her creative process as following the cycles she observes in the environment: observation, love, loss, surrender, and renewal. In her paintings, color functions as language. In her writing, language functions as something closer to light, a way of illuminating what is already there but not yet seen.
The book invites a reader to slow down. Meikle has described it as a space to pause, breathe, and rediscover what she calls the sacred threads that connect people to one another, to God, to the environment, and to themselves. It is informed by decades of sociological research into community, identity, and belonging, but it speaks in the register of art and devotion rather than the social sciences.
Where the art and the scholarship meet
Meikle’s dual practice is unusual in any discipline. She publishes peer reviewed research on community development and environmental preservation while simultaneously painting and donating canvases to raise money for students who cannot afford tuition. It reflects a worldview in which knowledge and beauty are not separate pursuits but expressions of the same commitment: that the people and places around you deserve your full attention.
Her Art with a Purpose initiative has produced dozens of works that have funded scholarships at Delta State University and supported charitable organizations in Tennessee and Arkansas. She does not maintain a gallery or a commercial presence. She paints, donates, or gifts, and then paints again. For Meikle, the act of giving the work away is not separate from the work itself. It is the point of it.
The person behind the pages
Outside of the classroom and the studio, Meikle gardens. She cooks and entertains. She hikes and volunteers. She describes these not as hobbies but as extensions of the same practice that drives her art and her research: cultivating beauty in everyday spaces, paying attention to what grows.
Her life’s trajectory, from Jamaica to Mississippi to the Philippines to Arkansas, from department chair to painter to poet, is not a story of reinvention. It is a story of accumulation. Each landscape, each community, each student, each canvas has added a layer to the way she sees the world. The Journey is the first time she has put all of those layers into a single work.
As she has written: her art is a meeting place of sacredness, passion, and scholarship, where color becomes language and language becomes light. The book is that meeting place, made public.
Publication Details
Title: The Journey
Author: Dr. Paulette Ann Meikle
Genre: Poetry / Reflections / Art & Nature
Copyright © 2025 Dr. Paulette Ann Meikle Dr. Meikle is available for interviews, readings, and media appearances
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