College program to honor writer Morrison
Prairie View A&M University announced Friday that it will establish a program in honor of the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
The Toni Morrison Writing
Program, slated to launch this fall, will also honor Morrison’s former student MacKenzie Scott, a writer and philanthropist who donated $50 million to the college in December. The gift was the largest single donation in the university’s history.
Using $3 million from Scott’s gift, Prairie View will endow and kick-start the program, which will offer a writer-in-residence each year and will sponsor a high school writing contest, with the winner awarded a college scholarship.
The selected writer-in-residence will host readings of their work and of other writers to help bring more exposure to the craft and to the legacy of African American writers, particularly those educated at historically black colleges and universities, the university said in a release.
Emma Joahanne Thomas-Smith, Prairie View’s provost emerita, will oversee the Toni Morrison Writing Program. Thomas Smith, who previously led the honors program and English department at Prairie View, plans to invite university faculty, staff and area high schools to take part in the writing activities.
The new program will also collaborate with literary organizations, including the Toni Morrison Society, a nonprofit comprised of scholars and readers of Morrison’s work.
University President Ruth Simmons developed a friendship with the awardwinning author after she recruited Morrison to Princeton University as a creative writing professor while Simmons was associate dean of faculty there. It was at Princeton where Scott was a student and Morrison her mentor.
Like Simmons, Morrison was an alumna of an HBCU, Howard University in Washington, D.C. Simmons did her undergraduate work at Dillard University in New Orleans.
After Morrison’s death in 2019, Simmons told the Houston Chronicle that she and Scott went to dinner at a Princeton dedication event for the author. They kept in touch about things that didn’t involve Prairie View, she said.
“It was such a surprise, because I didn’t ask for anything,” Simmons said of Scott’s later $50 million donation. “It was literally out of the blue.”
Morrison, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize in literature, is known for her canonical works including “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Tar Baby” and “Beloved,” which was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998.