Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 17, 1995 TAG: 9510170021
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ADRIANNE BEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lucinda Roy knows just when to click the shutter. She deals in capturing moments, freezing them on paper.
Readers of her latest book of poetry, "The Humming Birds," travel through a world where they feel the pull of history. Where a women today tries to imagine another giving birth in the crowded filth of a slave ship and realizes because of her freedom: she "knows nothing."
"Anyone brought over to this continent from Africa shouldn't have survived because of the conditions they were put into," Roy said. "But they found a way to experience joy and celebrate."
An associate dean in Virginia Tech's College of Arts and Sciences and an associate professor of English, Roy grew up in England. Her father, a Jamaican sculptor and writer, worked in a Brillo pad factory.
"He was very poor," Roy said. Her father died when she was 5, leaving his wife to raise three children on her own.
"My mother was full of laughter," Roy remembers. "She loved poetry; I inherited that from her."
"The Humming Birds" recently won the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize, a contest judged by poet Lucille Clifton.
One of Roy's slave-narrative paintings, "Suffering the Sea Change: Not Venus, but Rising," is the cover art for her new book. In her poetry, readers experience the same spirit she captures in her painting, finding a way to push up out of the darkness.
"The Humming Birds" follows "Wailing the Dead to Sleep," Roy's first book of poetry. The honesty of a poet who sometimes loses her muse, who knows language's limitations speaks in her work:
"I don't know where things come from anymore."
"I don't know how to write / about absolute stillness / when words themselves disrupt the surface."
Roy's talents extend beyond poetry and painting. She has initiated several programs at the university that reach out into the community. She was a co-founder of the Service-Learning Program at Tech, set up "so students can combine community service with course work."
A new endowed professorship, with financial backing from the Virginia Tech Athletic Association, will help Roy continue her work. She says she hopes the award will help bring races together and ultimately help bring "an understanding of each other."
The first recipient of the Gloria D. Smith Professorship, Roy will hold an adjunct, two-year appointment in the Black Studies Program. The professorship, established with a $200,000 endowment from the Athletic Association, is named for Gloria D. Smith, who came to work at Virginia Tech in 1983 as an assistant professor in University Counseling Services. Smith retired in 1993, and died not long after.
"Gloria was a friend of mine," Roy said. "She was admired, very brave, a quietly determined woman who didn't let obstacles get in her way. Students felt they could turn to her and most importantly she believed in the power of the community."
Roy is excited about the award, which she feels "puts Virginia Tech in the vanguard" of colleges that are supporting minority studies.
"There are ways to reconcile differences, and no reason why majority students cannot work well with minority students on issues that affect them both," Roy said. She hopes to use the endowment "for software such as interactive CD ROMs and for travel so people can learn about black studies."
Education technology is Roy's speciality. She speaks all over the country on the subject, but Roy also says Tech can be proud to "hang onto tradition" while it advances technologically.
With past success conducting a class on-line on the computer, Roy hopes to be able to conduct another, larger class in the same fashion. She stresses the importance of learning how to access information from the Internet, especially for Tech athletes who are often time-pressed for academics with their schedules.
Roy hopes people will see that "academics and athletics are not divorced from one another." Talking with the women's basketball coach at Tech, Roy is "trying to find a way to get the faculty involved" and a way to get people to "support the women's team as much as the men's."
The Athletic Association's endowment "shows they have commitment to minority affairs," Roy said. "Look at athletes like Michael Jordan, Dave Robinson. They have forged a path for minorities. It shows what kind of an influence athletics can have on a culture."
When she is "old and gray," Roy said, she hopes to own a professional women's basketball team.
But right now, Roy says, "if this award finds a way for me to work with multiculturalism, I'll be thrilled."
When she sang like a woman washing her hands,
we sat back in our pews and let the hard brown wood
polish us to common brightness....
When she sang like a woman torn by sickle moons
we rode our pews like horses -
our breath short, our mouths puckered
into small stars.
- from "Gospel," by Lucinda Roy
EVENTS HONORING LUCINDA ROY
THURSDAY
Noon-2 p.m. Book Signing for "The Humming Birds" at Volume II Bookstore, University Mall, Blacksburg.
5-6 p.m. Roy reading from "The Humming Birds," Colonial Hall in Squires Student Center, Virginia Tech.
6-8 p.m. Reception, book-signing and jazz at the Black Cultural Center in Squires Student Center, Virginia Tech.
by CNB