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Noted Author Slated For Afr'Am Fest

  By Rosaland Tyler
Assistant Editor
New Journal and Guide

   Award-winning author Carolivia Herron, a former Harvard University professor and Portsmouth native, will be on hand to celebrate and to inspire many festivalgoers when Afr’Am Fest celebrates its 25th season May 24-26.
    Herron is the award-winning author of the children’s book titled, Nappy Hair. It is a controversial picture book which caused a third-grade teacher in New York City in 1998, to request a transfer to another school after disgruntled parents complained when she read the book to children in her classroom, who were largely black and Hispanic.
   “I wrote it delighting in my own nappy hair,” Herron said later in a Dec. 3, 1998 Washington Post story. “I love my own nappy hair and the stories my uncle used to tell me about it. It was a celebration, and I had no idea it would be political. I am a 60s person and thought we had already dealt with this problem of being ashamed of our hair.”
    The book is based on her relationship with her 103-year-old grandmother, Olivia Smith, a lifelong resident of Portsmouth, and her Sephardic Jewish and African American Geechee ancestors.
  

Posted May 7, 2008

   Smith told Herron stories about her life in Portsmouth at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation and about her own great-grandmother, Sarah, a Sephardic Jew kidnapped from Italy by Barbary pirates in 1805.
    Herron has written three other books: Always an Olivia, Thereafter Johnnie (Random House 1991-) and an edition of the writings of Angelina Weld GrimkZ (Oxford University Press 1991).
    A scholar who earned a doctoral degree in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Herron has been a professor or a visiting scholar at many prestigious universities including MIT, Brandeis, William & Mary, California State University, and University of Congo.
   Herron has won many awards including fellowships to Yale, the Smithsonian and the Fullbright Fellowship to Mexico. Currently, she is on a national speaking tour. She continues to write fiction and to develop online multimedia educational products.
   Herron will appear at 1 p.m., May 25 at Temple Sinai, in Churchland. The next day, she will appear at Afr’Am Fest in the Literary Cafe at Norfolk’s Point Park.
  
   

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