A Poet And A Scholar - Dolores Kendrick - Brief Article

When Dolores Kendrick was named poet laureate of Washington, D.C., last summer, she said she wanted to keep busy. The poet-educator has gotten her wish: Pursuing her vision of wedding poetry to other art forms while making it more accessible to the public certainly has taken time.

This past April, the D.C. native held a reading at the Washington Folk Festival and was invited to dinner at the Library of Congress to read selections from her writings along with other American poets, including Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. She recently established the D.C. Poetry Festival for high-school students. Teachers at seven schools solicited poetry from their students and sent the best work to Kendrick, who, along with a committee, selected four winners. On May 18, the students spent most of the day showcasing their talent. When she's not reading, writing or critiquing poetry, Kendrick is seeking funds for a stage adaptation of her critically acclaimed play, The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women.

Kendrick was appointed to the three-year term (with an option for three more) as D.C.'s poet laureate by Mayor Anthony A. Williams. She is the second poet laureate in the district's history; poet and literary giant Sterling Brown, who was appointed to the position in 1984, was the first to hold the honor.

So far. Kendrick says, the highlight of her appointment has been her commission to write a poem to accompany a sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. that will be erected in front of the Martin Luther King Memorial Library in downtown Washington in 2001. "To have my work in stone in Washington, the city [in which] I was born and raised, is humbling," Kendrick says. "It will be here long after I am gone."

Kendrick credits longtime poet and activist E. Ethelbert Miller for her nomination to this coveted position. Miller, director of Howard University's African American Resource Center, says that the choice was simple: "I would place Dolores before myself. She is a groundbreaker elevating this genre and an activist defining what this position will be."

For decades, Kendrick has been an educator and a poet, sowing seeds of love and appreciation for language. She is a master teacher, a Fulbright fellow, and the Vita I. Heinz emerita at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Her soft-spoken and relaxed nature belies a burning desire to publicize poetry. "I love language and the imagery it provokes," she says, her movements underscoring the excitement she still feels after all these years. Her job, as she sees it, is to inject the same enthusiasm that she feels about poetry and language into adults and children--especially African Americans.

COPYRIGHT 2000 American Visions Media, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group