Tender Poems for Troubled Times: Honoring the Haiku of Richard Wright
Join us for an afternoon of tea and haiku composed by author and poet, Richard Wright, during the last years of his life while exiled in Paris. Professor Emerita Theresa "T" Ford will be joined via zoom with Julia Wright and scholars* to discuss Richard Wright’s influence on their current work and the importance of his poetry as a space to conquer loss, pain, healing and joy.
Photographer: Stephen Harvey
About the Speaker
Professor Emerita Theresa “T” Ford
Professor Emerita Theresa "T" Ford is an educator, literary scholar, and arts advocate whose work spans more than four decades. She has taught courses in the Humanities, Cross Cultural and Black Studies, including Black and African American Literature, Black Women in Media, Literature and Film, Blues as Literature, History and Culture, and Black Music and HipHop Music and Culture.
Her scholarship includes a particular focus on African American literature. Professor Ford completed professional and graduate seminars through the National Endowment for the Humanities at the University of Kansas, including the Project on the History of Black Writing/Langston Hughes Project and The Wrighting Connection: The Works of Richard Wright. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar's Fellowship: Making Modernism: Literature and Culture in Chicago including the Chicago Renaissance, 1893-1955.
Professor Ford has presented her scholarship both nationally and internationally, including at the Japan Black Studies Association’s 65th Annual Conference in Kyoto, Japan. Her contributions to education and the arts have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Distinguished Faculty and President’s Leadership Award from Grossmont College, an International Award for Teaching Excellence from the University of Texas–Austin, and the California State Assembly’s 79th District Woman Leader in the Field of the Arts Award.
She is also a member of the Richard Wright Society.
*Scholars:
Joseph G. Ramsey, University of Massachusetts-Boston
Deborah Mutnick, Long Island University
Donald Kizza-Brown, Harvard
Toru Kiuchi, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan / The Haiku Foundation, Tokyo, Japan
Judah Adashi, Johns Hopkins University
If you have any questions, please email programs@niwa.org