Ms. Afrika Abney - Consultant Branding Blog

  I met Ms. Eloise Greenfield when I was a student.    " Children’s author Ms. Eloise Greenfield was born in Parmele, North Carolina, and raised in Washington, DC. She attended Miner Teachers’ College (now the University of the District of Columbia) and went on to work as a clerk in the US Patent Office. The monotony of the job drove her to experiment with making up rhymes, and eventually Greenfield began writing poetry in earnest. Her first published poem appeared in the Hartford Times in 1962. Since then, Greenfield has published more than 40 books for children, including works of poetry, biography, picture books, and chapter books. Her work is widely praised for its depiction of African American experience, particularly family life; Greenfield has said she began writing for children after looking in vain for books for her own children that reflected their life. ."   She recently passed.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/eloise-greenfield

  "Ms. Dolores Kendrick was born and raised in Washington DC. She earned a teaching certificate from Miner Teacher’s College and an MA from Georgetown University. She first taught in the Washington DC public school system, where she helped found the School Without Walls; for two decades she taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, where she was the first Vira I. Heinz Professor Emerita. In 1999 Kendrick was appointed poet laureate of the District of Columbia. She was the second poet to hold the position, after  Sterling Brown . She has developed a series of initiatives aimed at forging connections between poets, poetry, and communities, both in Washington DC and further afield in Aix-en-Provence, where Kendrick has also taught. As she told the  Washington Post,  “I don’t believe poetry should be a solitary intellectual adventure. It should be a relationship with people, it should forge a connection. Good poetry does not belong to the poet.”   Kendrick is the author of