Brenda Walcott

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.