Award-winning poet francine j. harris has been promoted to full professor with tenure at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, Department of English at the University of Houston.
Professorship and tenure are “remarkable achievements on their own accord and rarely granted in unison,” according to UH.
Harris, who joined the UH Creative Writing Program as an Associate Professor in 2019, becomes the first Black woman professor in that program to receive tenure, as harris announced on social media and as confirmed by UH CWP.
This comes at a time when only about 2% of tenured associate and full professors at U.S. universities and colleges are Black women, as harris also noted, according to 2019 data by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Harris won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, considered among the most prestigious literary awards, for her third collection Here is the Sweet Hand. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and MacDowell Colony, and her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and an Audre Lorde Award.
In an interview with the University of Houston’s Jillian Holden, harris said: “I think a lot about nuance and subtlety. Poetry is the one place I have felt like I have the room just to suggest things … I can digress, tangent and drift off … If more people understood that poetry gives you this kind of freedom, maybe more people would tap in.”
This week, Prairie View A&M University announced poet, journalist, author, cultural critic, and activist Kevin Powell as the second writer-in-residence of the Toni Morrison Writing Program.
Powell succeeds Nikki Giovanni, who served as the program’s inaugural writer-in-residence last academic year. His term began on September 1, 2022, with his first public lecture to be scheduled later this month, according to a press release.
Author of 15 books, including the essay collection When We Free The World, Powell has worked as senior writer at Vibe Magazine, and he has written for The New York Times, CNN.com, The Nation, NPR, ESPN, Essence, Esquire, Ebony, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, among others.
Following his appearance on The Real World: New York, the first season of the seminal MTV reality television series, Powell wrote Keepin’ It Real: Post-MTV Reflections On Race, Sex, and Politics.
His new poetry collection, Grocery Shopping with My Mother, will published by Soft Skull/Penguin Random House in December 2022.
Powell studies; Powell thinks deeply. He takes a stance on a cornucopia of issues, including, but not limited to, social justice, interpersonal relationships, hip hop culture, and environmentalism, you name it. He challenges a multi-generational audience and issues to them a call to action. Given today’s socio-political climate, nothing could be more timely, especially for HBCU college students for whom the college years are an apprenticeship for thoughtful, meaningful, intentional participation in the change they wish to see.
Provost Emerita Emma Joahanne Thomas-Smith, Director of the Toni Morrison Writing Program
The Toni Morrison Writing Program was established in March 2021 with a gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, a former student of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison. Scott donated $50 million to the University in October 2020, with $3 million of her gift to endow the new program.
The writing program also partners with the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice and aims to foster an “exploration of social justice from the perspective of literature, public policy, entertainment, environmental science, athletics, health, and other areas,” according to its website.
Houston Arts Journal 