Christal
Cooper – 1,668 Words
The Three Loves of Lita
Hooper:
Poetry, Teaching, and
Sojourner Truth
When Lita Hooper, 45, was in the third grade,
living in suburbia Chicago, she experienced her first love of poetry.
“I have a very strong memory of sitting on the front steps and reading
a book of poems for children. Something
just connected with poetry for me.”
Soon reading poetry was not enough for
the third grader, and she started writing her own poems in notebooks and hardcover
books.
“My
mom would always find these old books and she’d flip to the back and read some
little handwritten poems by me.”
By the time she was in high school,
Hooper wrote her first poetry manuscript.
She also proved herself to be academically gifted in writing, especially
about poetry, to where her teachers would initiate conversation with her about
the art form.
Her high school friends also would initiate
poetry talk with Hooper.
“Someone would say they were in love with someone or they wanted someone’s attention and they would ask me to write the poem that they would give to the boy or girl.”
“Someone would say they were in love with someone or they wanted someone’s attention and they would ask me to write the poem that they would give to the boy or girl.”
After graduating from high school in June of
1986, Hooper decided to major in Communications and attended DePaul University’s
north side campus, located in Lincoln Park, which Hooper described as a very
dynamic artistic community.
“I started going to
poetry readings and seeing the magic of poetry as a live art as opposed to just
poems in a book. I think that’s the first
connection I made in sound poetry.”
At the time, her career aspiration had
nothing to do with poetry or teaching, but in corporate communications.
She earned her BA in Communications
from DePaul University in June of 1991.
Her career aspirations changed when she
spent a year at the University
of Iowa, where she decided to switch majors to African American Studies.
“I
was always struck and very much in awe in African Americans who stood up
against the institution of slavery in whatever way. My fascination with these amazing people is
the daring and the idea that you would put your life at risk for the lives of
other people you don’t even know.
Harriet Tubman going back and fourth to rescue slaves and Sojourner
Truth who literally walked away from her slave owner and dared the courts to
stop her when she tried to get custody of her son. That kind of audacity is just awesome to me.”
She received a full scholarship to University of
Colorado at Boulder, another dynamic artistic community. While at Boulder she made a major decision.
“I
finally decided to stop trying to find other ways to exist without writing as a
primary source of my life and just give in to it. I switched majors to creative writing, and it
made all the difference.”
Hooper took her very first creative
writing class at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and made it her goal to
figure out how to be a successful writer.
She began writing and sending things out for
publication. Her first poem published
was “Just Us”, a poem based on a painting by Romare Bearden (http://www.beardenfoundation.org).
“I remember saying, “Oh
my gosh. I got published.” The guy next to me was checking his (post
office) box and said, “congratulations.’”
She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing
from the University of Colorado in Boulder June of 1990.
She moved
to Atlanta, Georgia to get her Doctrine of Arts degree from Clark Atlanta
University. The Doctorate of Arts in
Humanities degree is similar to the PhD but combined with teaching.
“It
was the emerging track in the 1980s.
Doctorate of Arts program is pretty rare.
Only a handful of schools offer this degree. They emphasize a major in English, a foreign
language, sociology but you also had to double major in humanities with a
strong emphasis on teaching. It allows them to study what they want to study but
teaching them how to teach it.”
Her intention was to have teaching be her
secondary career to support her first career of writing, only to discover that
writing and teaching were both her primary careers.
“I’m
doing this masters and this doctrine. I’m teaching as well and I’m learning how
to teach and loving it and all this time I thought of teaching as (just) a
living. I’m a great teacher and I love
teaching and it was just kind of a fluke that I fell in this career as a way to
sustain myself as a writer, but I consider myself an educator as well as a
writer.”
She earned her Doctorate of Arts Degree
in English with an emphasis on teaching in June of 1999.
Hooper is Associate Professor of English at
Georgia Perimeter College, the largest two-year college in the state of
Georgia, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on poetry.
After six years of teaching at Georgia
Perimeter College, Hooper and her husband Michael welcomed their baby girl, and
named her Sojourner Truth, after Hooper’s heroine whom she admired since she
was in elementary school.
“I remember vaguely
learning about Sojourner Truth in a black history program around 5th
or 6th grade. Everyone had to
say something about an African American.
I didn’t get Sojourner Truth as my person but someone else did. I remember loving the name Sojourner Truth.”
It was not until her freshman year in African
American Studies that she delved deeper into Sojourner Truth’s life and legacy.
Five years later, in 2005, Hooper took a
sabbatical to spend time with her children (seven year old son Malik and her
five year old daughter Sojourner “Soji”) and to write a collection of poems.
When people learned of five year old Soji’s full
name they would exclaim how wonderful it was that she was named after Sojourner
Truth.
“She used to get so
embarrassed and say, “I don’t get it.” She
knew it was important because of the way people reacted. I decided to write a collection of poems to
let my daughter know and understand why we named her after someone so heroic
and iconic.”
For her research, Hooper reread the Narrative
of Sojourner Truth and
realized how much she had forgotten. She
also discovered how much she enjoyed the genre of the slave narrative, but
found that she had unanswered questions.
“There were so many
places where the narrative would say something horrific, and then it would just
go on to the next thing. Why didn’t
they stop and discuss this? Why didn’t
she elaborate here and why did she go past this horrific thing? And every time I would do that I would stop
and say, “Okay, what would I say here if I were writing the narrative”. That’s where I would stop and write the poem
and that’s why the book is written in such a way with the narrative on the left
side and the poem in response is on the right side.”
It
took Hooper about eighteen months to finish the manuscript. She would write weekly at the local Starbucks
coffee house,
sitting in the same place, drinking espresso Octane
Coffee, reading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and writing
the Sojourner Truth persona poems in longhand.
“I
read a little bit of the narrative and every time I hit that point of – I
called it gaps – I would allow myself to think about the passage and write a
poem in longhand. Each poem would take
several days (to write) of course. I would take some line or phrase or excerpt
from the narratives and star the poem off and it would be like a jump off point
for me.”
She made it a point to discuss her
writing progress with her family at the dinner table.
“I
would read parts of the work to them and they would bounce ideas and some of
the things were so insightful. Malik
would ask me the right questions. He was
a kid at the time and he didn’t know he was helping me think things through.”
During the 18 month sabbatical Hooper
also received an emerging artist grant from the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of
Cultural Affairs, and decided to create an artifact that she imagined Sojourner
Truth would have –a notebook in long hand of Sojourner Truth’s own thoughts in
the form of Hooper’s poems.
“I
had handmade paper commissioned from a woman here in Atlanta and bound it in
this beautiful kind of worn leather cover and I stained the handmade paper with
coffee grinds from the coffee house that I wrote all the poems. For
the public reading for the grant I had the book on display and I wrote everything
out longhand and somebody thought that it was actually Sojourner Truth’s
journal and it was amazing.”
Thunder in Her Voice The Narrative of
Sojourner Truth was published by Willow Books (the Poetry Imprint of
Aquarius Press) in March of 2010.
The book is a very slim volume of
poetry and tight which is what Hooper intended it to be for the purpose of having
someone be able to read it and digest it in one reading and then allowing it to
resonate with the reader days later.
Hooper defines a poet as someone who
manipulates language in order to reflect some truth about human kind. In Thunder In Her Voice The Narrative of
Sojourner Truth both Hooper and Truth collaborate together in the form
of persona poems in response to the Slave narrative.
Through this collaboration another
poetry collection is formed and the art form is advanced, but more importantly
the manipulation of language and the use of the craft help to explain Truth’s,
Hooper’s, and the reader’s existence.
Therefore, we as the readers of this
unique volume of poetry, experience the world in a new way, revealing our own
aspirations, but more importantly reflecting some truth about human kind that
can only be for the good of all who read.
PHOTOGRAPH
DESCRIPTION AND COPYRIGHT INFO
Photo
1
Lita
Hooper in September of 2010. Copyright
by Lita Hooper.
Photo
2
Briyana. Copyright by Christal Rice Cooper
Photo
3
Briyana. Copyright by Christal Rice Cooper.
Photo
4
Lita Hooper. Copyright by Lita Hooper.
Lita Hooper. Copyright by Lita Hooper.
Photo
5
Completed
in 1992, Richardson Library faces the Quad in the heart of DePaul University's
Lincoln Park Campus. Attributed to Kris Gallagher. Multi-license with GFDL and Creative Commons
CC-BY-SA-2.5 and older versions (2.0 and 1.0)
http://www.depaul.edu/about/campuses/Pages/lincoln-park.aspx
http://www.depaul.edu/about/campuses/Pages/lincoln-park.aspx
Photo
6
Aerial
Overview of Lincoln Park, looking NNW along North Lake Shore Drive. Passerelle
is roughly halfway up, opposite North Avenue Bathing Beach at Middle Right of
Frame. - Passerelle in Lincoln Park, spanning North Lake Shore Drive (U.S.
Route 41) on axis of East Menomonee Street, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois.
(source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/il0835.photos.318376p/). This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United
States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1,
Section 105 of the US Code.
Photo 7
Photo
8
Retouched
portrait of Harriet Tubman in 1885.
Attributed to Artist: H. Seymour Squyer, 1848 - 18 Dec 1905. Public Domain.
Photo
9
Early
image of Sojourner Truth. Public Domain.
Photo
10
Photo
11
Photo
12.
Clark
Atlanta University Seal. Fair Use Under
the United States Copyright Law.
Photo
13
Lita
Hooper in August 2011. Copyright by Lita
Hooper.
Photo
14
Photo
15
Lita
Hooper at Leslie University. Copyright
by Lita Hooper.
Photo
16
Briyana. Copyright by Christal Rice Cooper.
Photo
17.
Sojourner
Truth in 1864.
Photo
18
Original
jacket cover of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
Photo
19
Lita
Hooper’s daughter Soji. Copyright by
Lita Hooper.
Photo
20
Sojourner
Truth in 1870. Public Domain.
Photo
21
Lita
Hooper. Copyright by Lita Hooper.
Photo
22
Lita
Hooper in July 2010. Copyright by Lita
Hooper.
Photo
23, 24, and 25
Lita
Hooper’s artifact – Copyright by Lita Hooper.
Photo
26
Sojourner
Truth. Public Domain.
Photo
27
Lita
Hooper giving a poetry reading of Thunder In Her Voice The Narrative of
Sojourner Truth
Photo
28
Jacket
cover of Thunder In Her Voice The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
Photo
29
Photo
30
Lita
Hooper holding Thunder In Her Voice The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Copyright by Lita Hooper.
Photo
31
Lita
Hooper in December 2012. Copyright by Lita
Hooper.
.jpg)
