Derrick, a Reading and Language Arts Teacher for many years, hails from the hilly sunshine country side of eastern Hanover, in beautiful, Jamaica. The eight of eleven children who grew up poor but did not allow poverty to define his ambition nor his future. He was always an average student whose ambition was bigger than he was. He learned early that education was the only vehicle towards upward mobility and with dint of sweat and hard work he came to realize his dreams.
Guided by parents who fully embraced this mantra: "Hard work is the secret of success" he worked so hard, registered himself in a teacher training college and forged a path so purposely, his fellow cohorts wrote of him in the college Magazine: "Man from west, who never rest." In 1972 he achieved his first dream, a Teaching Diploma from Mico Teacher's College in Jamaica, with distinction in Psychology. In 1988, a Certificate in Reading from the University of the West Indies. He further matriculated in 1984 -1986 with a Bachelor of Science and a Masters Of Arts Degree in Education with specialties in Reading and Language Arts, from the University of Western Carolina. Mr. Harding has always had a love for writing and furthered his studies, at Extra Mural writing Center at the University of the West Indies in Kingston Jamaica where he got his first stamp of approval that he had a flair for writing. He continued to hone his skills in writing unpublished short stories and poems. He has two soon to be published novels to his credit, but found compelling reasons to publish his first novel "A Two Years Journey- From, Leukemia and Aneurism, to Total Health."
