| Summary: | Professor Miriam DeCosta-Willis was born on November 1, 1934, in Florence, Alabama. She grew up in the South but graduated from Westover School and received her B A. degree and Phi Beta Kappa honors from Wellesley College in 1956, and her M A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Johns Hopkins University in 1960 and 1967, respectively. After teaching at LeMoyne and Owen Colleges, she became the first African American faculty member at Memphis State University. In 1970, she was named professor of Spanish and, later, chair of the department of romance languages at Howard University. Before retiring from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 1999, she taught at LeMoyne-Owen and was Commonwealth Professor at George Mason. As co-founder of the Memphis Black Writers' Workshop, she has published eight books and numerous articles. She had four children with her first husband, Russell Sugarmon, Jr.
|
|---|
