Brenda Walcott’s reading has been postponed due to health complications.  We will reschedule for the spring of 2016.

Brenda Walcott is a teacher and a writer who has never separated those two worlds.  Her teaching career started in an experimental early child hood school, in her home city of Brooklyn, New York.  Children with symptoms ranging from autism to severe infantile depression were mainstreamed, with those children to were developmentally “normal.”

Brenda was also apart of Umbra, a Collective of young African-American writers based in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  Umbra was founded in 1962 and was the first post-civil rights African-American literary group to publish volumes with a distinctly different literary voice, and a voice that was at some points at odds with the prevailing white literary establishment.

Brenda was accepted into Harvard’s School of Education and earned her Masters concentrating in “Laboratory of Human Development.”  She researched and created educational media for Third World children.  Brenda then returned to New York and worked as a Teacher/coordinator at the college for Human Services.  There, she taught Social Work and supervised adult students, in filed sites, such as state hospitals and outpatient facilities.

For ten years, she taught literature and was the Director of Minority Affairs  at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art.  As Director, she provided academic and personal counseling.

in 1988, Brenda went to Brandeis and earned a second Master’s Degree in Theater Arts and was offered a job at the National Reading Council, in New York City.  As the Director of Technical Assistance, Brenda worked with struggling public schools and community based learning programs, to evaluate and help them strengthen their work with “at risk” children and adults.  In recent years, she has focused this range of skills on adult and higher education programs in Massachusetts.