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April Langley
Simmons, Judy Dothard (1944– )
A poet, essayist, feature writer, editor, reviewer,
and broadcaster, Judy Dothard Simmons was born
in Westerly, Rhode Island, on August 29, 1944,
the daughter of Amanda Catherine Dothard and
Edward Everett Simmons, Jr., who divorced when
she was five. Simmons attended public schools
in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and
Alabama and finished at Allen High, a Methodist
boarding school, in 1960. After a year at venerable
Talladega College, she graduated California State
University–Sacramento with a B.A. in psychology
in 1967. Coming of age during the height of the
BLACK POWER movement, Simmons was moved by
her social conscience to teach disadvantaged youths
in the newly created Job Corps at Rodman Center,
in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1968 she was
among the first black female college hires at AT&T;
she spent six years in corporate management.
During the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT Simmons
performed with AMIRI BARAKA (Le Roi Jones) in
San Francisco and Oakland. DUDLEY RANDALL
published her first poetry collection, Judith’s Blues
(1973), with historic BROADSIDE PRESS in Detroit.
Her second collection, A Light in the Dark, con-
taining poems and writings commissioned by
Literacy Volunteers of America, was published in- In 1984 Blind Beggar Press published Decent
Intentions, her third collection of poems. In Drum-
voices, EUGENE REDMOND identified her as one of
New York’s up-and-coming poets.
Widely anthologized, Simmons’s poems ap-
peared in Redmond’s Drumvoices, Amiri and
Amina Baraka’s Confirmation, QUINCY TROUPE’s
Giant Talk, and STEPHEN HENDERSON’s Understand-
ing the New Black Poetry. For example, Simmons’s
“The Answer” placed her squarely in the ideologi-
cal camp of Baraka, NIKKI GIOVANNI, and SARAH
WEBSTER FABIO:
Ask me why I don’t write joyous verses
On childhood rambles; odes to tenderness
Politely touched with bearable nostalgia
For little loves and little pains and freight
trains... All of which are proper in their place
... As guns and deadly poems are
For my race.
“It’s Comforting” crafts a compelling continuity
between autobiography and the social histories in
caste and class. Thematically, Simmons’s work is a
fierce welding of personal accomplishment with so-
cial responsibility as exampled by her father’s great-
great-grandfather, the civil rights leader George T.
Downing (1819–1903), an associate of SOJOURNER
TRUTH and FREDERICK DOUGLASS, and her maternal
grandmother, educator Mary Julia Ross (1890–
1991), who was the first of three college-educated
generations—a rarity for most American families
in the first half of the 20th century.
As a gifted communicator based in New York,
Simmons has been a respected editor with Essence,
Ms., and Emerge as well as for authors AUDRE LORDE,
Baraka, Wesley Brown, and George Davis, among
others. Simmons’s writing has been featured in
American Legacy, BLACK ISSUES BOOK REVIEW, 33
Things Every Girl Should Know about Women’s Lib
(Random House), Wild Women Don’t Wear No
Blues (Doubleday), The Black Woman’s Health Book
(Seal Press), The Psychopathology of Everyday Rac-
ism and Sexism (Harrington Press), QBR, The Vil-
lage Voice, and The New York Daily News. SimmonsSimmons, Judy Dothard 465