Born in
San Fernando, on November 10, 1934, she gained a BA and MSc (Sociology) at UWI Mona and St. Augustine, and an MA at
Michigan State University She received a Phd from UWI St Augustine. In London during the 1960s she was associated with the
Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), of which she was a former secretary, and participated in 1967 in the CAM symposium entitled "West Indian Theatre" at the
West Indian Students' Centre in London. Her 1968 drama
Play Mas′ — one of several
Carnival-based plays dating from around that time, including Lennox Brown's
Devil Mas′ (1971), Ronald Amoroso's
The Master of Carnival (1974) and
Mustapha Matura's
Rum and Coca Cola (1976), with other productions in the 1980s and '90s by
Earl Lovelace,
Derek Walcott and Rawle Gibbons similarly drawing on local creative resources — exemplified a belief expressed in her 1970 article "Towards a Revolution in the Arts", in the journal
Savacou: "We have only to look around us and listen....[W]e only have to listen across the Caribbean, on the streets, in the
Sound System yards, in the
Calypso tents, in the rejection statements of the
Rastafari--and we can know that we are in the presence of our own gods." She called on the middle-class artists to "stop looking back over their shoulders in some misty distance at
Shakespeare, at pleasing the European–oriented audiences with well-modulated verse and slick theatre, and (to) address themselves to experimenting with their own thing, unafraid to fail." Maxwell is the author of several books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and has also contributed articles and reviews to various publications. She has served as president of the Writers' Union of Trinidad and Tobago (WUTT), which she founded in 1980. ==Selected writings==