2021 Elinor Williams Hooker Tea Talks Presenter Bios
Panel #1, Racism, Land & The American Farming Landscape
Dr. Reginald Jackson serves as a consultant to artists and scholars who are conducting visual and cultural research related to African retentions in the Americas. Dr. Jackson holds a Ph.D. in Visual Anthropology and Communications from Union Institute, an MFA and a BFA from Yale University, a MSW from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and an AAS degree from RIT in Graphic Arts and Printing. His post-graduate work includes MIT, Smithsonian Institute, and Ford Foundation Fellowships. He is an Emeritus Professor of Communications at Simmons College and worked as academic V.P., Dean of International Relations, and Professor of Visual Communications at African University College of Communications in Ghana. Dr. Jackson is the founder and president of Olaleye Communications, Inc., located in Boston.
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r. Lydia Clemmons is the president of the Clemmons Family Farm in Charlotte, VT. Clemmons has earned a doctor of philosophy degree in medical anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s in public health from the University of Michigan, and a bachelor’s in human biology from Stanford. She has applied her management expertise to programs for nutrition, agriculture, HIV/AIDS, maternal and reproductive health, child survival, and primary school education, administered through various agencies, such as USAID, UNICEF, UNAIDS, the Centers for Disease Control, and many other governments and international programs. With this impressive academic and professional background, one might expect to meet an imposing perhaps distant personality. Quite the opposite is true. Her modesty, enthusiasm, energy, and warmth welcome all to join in her growing community of cultural activists and supporters.
Jarrad Nwameme is Chief Executive Officer of Triple J Farms LLC, a Black-owned farming business that uses sustainable practices and earth-friendly agricultural operations to bring the farm to the table. A philanthropist and entrepreneur, he is also the co-founder of Generations Nigeria and President of Crosstown Solutions Inc., a direct marketing firm.
Meghan Howey (moderator) is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in landscape archaeology and interdisciplinary approaches to deep-time coupled human-natural systems. She received her B.A. (2000) from the University of Delaware and her M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2006) from the University of Michigan. She has conducted research in North America, Europe, and East Africa. One of her major research projects has focused on Native American regional organization in the Northern Great Lakes region in the period preceding European Contact. She has explored how local communities construed and used ceremonial monument centers to facilitate economic, social and ideological interaction in this period. She also examines the critical role of food storage during this period as well. Dr. Howey is currently the James H. Hayes and Claire Short Hayes Professor of the Humanities and her project is “A Deep Time, Multi-Archive Narrative of the Anthropocene in the Great Bay”. In this capacity, she is the Director of the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS), a community-engaged and interdisciplinary archaeology program.
Panel #2, Writing While Black: The Afrofuturistic Writer
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science, and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books 2020) is her debut fiction collection. She is also the author of the hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press 2016), longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a PW Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (2011). She edited the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter (2000, 2004) and is the first to introduce W.E.B. Du Bois’s science fiction short stories. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland, The New York Times, and The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945 – 2010) edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage 2020). She was honored as a 2020 World Fantasy Award Finalist in the Special Award – Professional category for contributions to the genre and is the Editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949 and Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975. She also reviews new books for Asimov’s. She is a Special Guest and a Co-Host with Malka Older of the 2021 Hugo Awards Ceremony in Washington, DC. Sheree lives in Memphis, Tennessee, near a mighty river and a pyramid. Visit www.shereereneethomas.com
Nisi Shawl is an African American author, editor, and educator best known for their work dealing with gender, race, and colonialism such as the 2016 Nebula finalist Everfair and the classic text on inclusivity in the imaginative genres, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. In 2019 they received the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished service to the genre. Shawl’s story collection Filter House is a winner of the Tiptree/Otherwise Award. Additional publications include the collections Something More and More, A Primer on Nisi Shawl, and Talk Like a Man, part of PM Press’s Outspoken Author series. Additional honors include the World Fantasy Award, Starburst Magazine’s Brave New Words Award, Fiyah Magazine’s Ignyte Award, and two Locus Awards. They edited the acclaimed anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color; and WisCon Chronicles V: Writing and Racial Identity. They co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl has spoken at Duke University, Spelman College, Princeton, and University of Hawai’i Manoa, among other institutions. They live in Seattle, where they take frequent walks with their cat.
Dr. Reynaldo Anderson currently serves as Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Harris-Stowe State University in Saint Louis, Missouri. Reynaldo is currently the executive director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), an international network of artists, intellectuals, creatives, and activists. He is the co-editor of the following anthologies and journals, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness and The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design (Lexington), Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent (Cedar Grove Publishing), Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures, a special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity. He is also the author of numerous articles on Africana Studies and Communication studies and helped conceive the joint BSAM and NY LIVE Arts Curating the End of the World online exhibitions
Dennis Britton (moderator) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His research interests include early modern English literature (especially the literature of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser), Protestant theology, critical race theory, and the history of emotion. I am the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and co-editor with Melissa Walter of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (2018). I am also the coeditor with Kimberly Coles of a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” I am currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Human Difference on the Early Modern Stage, and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England.
Panel #3, Race & Care of the Soul
Thomas Moore is the author of the number-one New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul. He has written twenty-four other books about bringing soul to personal life and culture, deepening spirituality, humanizing medicine, finding meaningful work, imagining sexuality with soul, and doing religion in a fresh way. In his youth, he was a Catholic monk and studied music composition. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University and was a university professor for a number of years. He is also a psychotherapist influenced mainly by C. G. Jung and James Hillman. In his work he brings together spirituality, mythology, depth psychology, and the arts, emphasizing the importance of images and imagination. He often travels and lectures, hoping to help create a more soulful society. His family members are also deeply involved in spiritual approaches to the arts: His wife, Hari Kirin, is an accomplished painter and teaches a course she has created on Yoga and Art; his daughter Ajeet is a musician and recording artist and spiritual teacher; his stepson Abraham is an architect focusing on design related to the social aspects of building. Thomas also writes fiction, arranges music, and plays golf in New Hampshire, where he has lived for twenty years
Dr. Reginald A. Wilburn is an associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire specializing in African American literature and culture, Milton, and intertextuality studies. His monograph, Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature, was published by Duquesne University Press in 2014. This monograph is the first work of literary criticism to theorize African Americans’ subversive receptions of John Milton, England’s epic poet of liberty. The book examines Miltonic presence in the works of diverse writers from Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, to Frances Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Sutton E. Griggs. Wilburn is a recipient of two UNH teaching awards, mentors students in the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs and has sung the National Anthem at several Commencement exercises, most notably before U. S. Presidents, George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton in 2007. Presently, he is completing several manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals in addition to working on a second book project devoted to African Americans’ continued remastery of Milton in contemporary literature and culture.
Rev. Lauren Smith (moderator) was appointed Director of Stewardship and Development at the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) in February 2019. Her ties to Unitarian Universalism stretch back five generations. Her great-great-grandfather William Hazel was born a free black person in North Carolina and became a member of the First Parish in Cambridge after his family fled north prior to the Civil War. Rev. Smith served as co-minister of South Church Unitarian Universalist in Portsmouth, NH from 2011 through 2018, along with her husband, the Rev. Chris Holton Jablonksi. She also served as assistant minister at the UU congregation in San Mateo, CA, and as an Island Minister of the Star Island Retreat Center. Before entering seminary ministry, she worked as an Assistant Director at the Harvard Business School Fund.
Panel #4, It Happened In NH: Black History in the Granite State
Sharon Jones is a legendary performer and native of Portsmouth, NH. Sharon shines as an original stand-out of the Seacoast music scene, with engagements throughout New England, in Boston, and in New York. An entertainer in the classical sense of the word, Sharon’s versatility allows her to communicate with audiences in any setting. With her band, Sharon gives a riff-driven high-energy R&B and Blues performance that gets the crowds dancing. Her passion for performance radiates, and her expressiveness embraces her audiences. Ending Sharon’s concerts is a challenge as the audience begs for more! There is a mutual delight for Sharon and her longtime followers when she performs for NH Seacoast audiences.
Renay Allen is an author and artist who lives in Exeter, NH. An “artivist” – Renay likes to apply art to social issues in the form of painting, literature, graphic design, and sometimes fabric. Her most recent books include a trilogy of historical-fiction mysteries set in Exeter, NH: “Incident at Exeter Tavern (Jan 2020), “Incident at Ioka” (August 2020) and “Incident at Exeter Depot” is due April 2021. Her Maryvonne Mini-Mysteries series reveals the hidden history of the effaced Black community in Exeter, NH. She has also penned a series of small feminine spirituality books, “New Hampshire Goddess Chronicles” series 1-3 (published 2001-2016), that serve as guides for women looking to reinvent or re-inspire themselves using their own intuitive inner goddess. She is also the founder of an annual literary festival (ExeterLitFest.com) which celebrates the diverse voices of Exeter, NH authors, past and present.
Barbara Baker Williams was born in New Orleans, LA. She participated in the Civil Rights Movement from 1958 to 1962 and was instrumental in integrating the city. In 1962, at age 19, because of her affiliation with the Civil Rights Movement, she was taken by two white supremacists and placed on a “Freedom Train” from New Orleans to Nashua, NH. One year after arriving in Nashua, on the day John F, Kennedy was shot, she purchased her first home. While raising six children, Barbara earned a BS Degree in Business Management and Architecture from Hesser Business College. She worked as a purchasing agent, freelancing throughout NH and MA while designing and building homes. She also earned an MA in Architectural Design from the University of New Orleans.
Senator David Watters has worked as a professor of English, teaching American literature, New England studies, and New Hampshire literature and culture at the University of New Hampshire since 1978. Watters is frequently heard on New Hampshire Public Radio as a consultant for Granite State Stories and the Immigration Project. Deeply concerned about preserving our history, culture, arts, and environment, David served eight years as a trustee of the New Hampshire Historical Society, and on the board of directors for the New Hampshire Humanities, the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail, Pontine Movement Theatre, Strawbery Banke Museum’s Center for the Study of Community, and the Robert Frost Farm. He has visited hundreds of local libraries and historical societies to give talks.
Panel #5, The Power of Place: Martha’s Vineyard and the Growth of the Black Elite
Gretchen Sorin is a distinguished professor and director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program of the State University of New York. She holds a BA degree from Rutgers University in American Studies, an MA in Museum Studies from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, and a Ph.D. from Albany University in history. Dr. Sorin writes and lectures frequently on African American history and museum practice. Her books include Touring Historic Harlem, Four Walks in Northern Manhattan with architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art and Case Studies in Cultural Entrepreneurship: How to Create Relevant and Sustainable Institutions. Sorin’s new book “Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights was recently featured in the PBS documentary by Ric Burns.
Joanne Dowdell worked in the Washington, DC area for Congressional Quarterly and FDA news between 1989-2002. She was Senior Vice President of Global Government Affairs at New Corp, Washington, DC. In 2003, Dowdell moved to Portsmouth, NH to become Vice President and Director of Corporate Responsibility for Citizens Advisers. From 2008 through 2010, Dowdell was the Senior Vice President and Director of Corporate Responsibility for the Sentinel Financial Services Company of Montpelier, VT. In 2012, she ran for election to the US House representing New Hampshire’s 1st District. Also in 2012, she was one of four New Hampshire electors to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Dowdell was one of eight super delegates to the 2016 Democratic Convention from New Hampshire. She supported Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. She is a Member at Large for Executive Committee in the Democratic Party of New Hampshire (2016-present). Dowdell has a Bachelor’s Degree in Education from Howard University.
Loren Van Allen is a member of the Shearer Family, owners of Shearer Cottage, an African-American family-owned inn established almost 120 years ago. Shearer Cottage was listed in ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’ for decades. 6 generations of Loren’s family have owned homes, land and businesses on Martha’s Vineyard since the late 1800’s. Her great, great grandparents – Charles and Henrietta Shearer – first started going to the island for Baptist Revivals. They worshipped at the Baptist Tabernacle in the highlands of what was then Cottage City – later renamed Oak Bluffs. Shearer Cottage and Shearer Summer Theatre are part of a permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Power of Place.
Bithiah Carter (Moderator) is President and CEO of New England Blacks in Philanthropy, Boston, MA. She was formerly Executive Director of Grand Circles Foundation, Senior Director of the Division of Community Impact at United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, and Program Director of the Girls’of Greater Boston. Carter has also served as a consultant in the philanthropic sector, focusing on the needs of children and families in the Greater Boston and surrounding areas. Before entering the non-profit sector, she worked for nearly ten years in the financial services industry in New York, NY, and Boston, MA. In addition, she served on the boards of several local and national non-profit organizations. Carter has published several articles, including Examining the Value of Black America, In Memoriam, and Pledging Allegiance.
Panel #6, On Shaky Ground: Students of Color in Predominantly White Institutions
Rekha Mahadevan is a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school at Berwick Academy, in South Berwick, Maine. She is the recipient of many academic awards. During her freshman year, through a school program called Innovation Pursuit, Rekha examined her school’s environmental impact and ways to make it more sustainable. She then co-founded and leads the Sustainability Club. In addition, Rekha plays Varsity Field Hockey and participates in numerous clubs at school including United Nations and Diversity Club. Rekha is currently working on a project to give recognition to several unmarked African-American graves from the 1800s in her hometown of Madbury, NH. She is the daughter of two immigrants from South India and identifies as an Indian-American.
Grace Morelli is a Senior at the University of New Hampshire from Shrewsbury, MA. She is a Mathematics Education (Elementary/Middle School) and her Campus Involvement includes; Advisory Board Member & Tour Guide with the Student Rep Program, Intern with the Office of Admissions, Member of the United Asian Coalition, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, and the CONNECT Program. Grace is adopted from China!
Curtis Linton, University of New Hampshire Class of 2021, Mechanical Engineer. Curtis Linton ‘wanted to be an engineer. And he loved playing football. So when he was recruited by head coach Sean MacDonnell to play for UNH, Linton knew he’d found his place. Yes, he’d been recruited by other schools, but they wanted him to focus 100 percent on football. Majoring in engineering would take too much of his time and attention, they feared. In 2019, Linton, a McNair scholar and a member of the National Society of Black Engineers, was one of 15 students to present his research at the UNH McNair Scholar research symposium. Following that event, he traveled to California and shared his work on a weightless exercise system for outer space with students and experts at UCLA.
Kenneth Holmes is the senior vice provost for student life at the University of New Hampshire. Prior to that, he served at Howard University where he was vice president for student affairs. As the chief student affairs officer at Howard, Ken’s areas of responsibilities included residence life and university housing, the student health center, university counseling, student support services, D1 athletics, and intramural sports. Prior to joining Howard, he held similar roles at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the University of Bridgeport, and Binghamton University. He improved services for special needs populations, created an academic achievement floors program in residence halls to improve the freshman to sophomore retention rate, revised the code of conduct, and reorganized university counseling services to better meet the needs of students.
Jada Hebra (moderator) is the Senior Vice President & Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Southern NH. Prior to SNHU, and after a stint in broadcast news at ABC in New York, Hebra spent 25 years working in the private secondary school sector designing and supporting diversity and inclusion initiatives while also serving in leadership roles such as humanities teacher, associate dean of students, director of college advising, director of admission, dean of faculty and assistant head of school. With a BA in sociology from Vassar College, an MS from Columbia University School of Journalism and an MS in industrial and organizational psychology from SNHU currently underway, Hebra draws on her lifelong passion for people and storytelling to deepen her own and others’ understanding of bias and beauty across difference.
