Ariel Williams Holloway (March 3, 1905 –January 3, 1973) was an African-American poet of the

Harlem Renaissance The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the t ...

Early life and education

Holloway was born Lucy Ariel Williams in Mobile, Alabama. Her mother was Fannie Brandon, a teacher and choir singer, and her father was Dr. H. Roger Williams, a physician and pharmacist. She studied at Emerson Institute, Mobile and graduated from Talladega College in 1922. She earned a B.A. in Music at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (1926), after which she went on to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, from which she received another B.A. in Music with a major in piano and a minor in voice (1928). During the summers, Williams continued her musical studies with bandleader Fred Waring and at Columbia University. In 1936 she married Joaquin M. Holloway, a postal worker, with whom she had a son, Joaquin Jr., the following year.Honey, Maureen. ''Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance''. Rutgers University Press, 2006, p. 287. She preferred not to use her first nameAberjhani and Sandra L. West. ''Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance''. Facts on File/Infobase Publishing, 2003. and was known professionally first as Ariel Williams and later as Ariel Williams Holloway.

Career

Williams's ambition was to be a concert pianist but lack of opportunities drove her into teaching music. She began her teaching career as director of music at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (1926–32) and subsequently taught at Dunbar High School in Mobile (1932–1936), at Fessenden Academy in Florida (1936–1937), and at Lincoln Academy in Kings Mountain, North Carolina (1938–39).Roses, Lorraine E., and Ruth E. Randolph. ''Harlem Renaissance and Beyond; Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945''. Boston: G.K.Hall, 1990. In 1939, Williams became the first supervisor of music in the Mobile public school system, a job she held until her death in 1973. Ariel Williams Holloway Elementary School in Mobile was named in her honor. Between 1926 and 1935, Williams published five poems in '' Opportunity'', one of the leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance, and other poems in ''Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races''. She also published a single volume of verse, ''Shape Them into Dreams'' (Exposition Press, 1955). "Northboun'," a short poem in dialect about the Great Migration, has been called her "signature poem" and "one of the best poems of the period." Its haunting refrain underlines one of the major continuing divides in American culture:

O' de wurl' ain't flat, An' de wurl' ain't roun', H'it's one long strip Hangin' up an' down— Jes' Souf an' Norf; Jes' Norf an' Souf. —from Ariel Williams Holloway, "Northboun'"

"Northboun'" won an important prize in ''Opportunity'' (where it was first published in 1926) and has been collected in several anthologies, including ''Golden Slippers'' (1941), edited by Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and

Arna Bontemps Arna Wendell Bontemps ( ) (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance. Early life Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His a ...

, and Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph's ''Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950'' (Harvard University Press, 1996).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Williams Holloway, Ariel American women poets African-American poets 20th-century American educators African-American musicians 1905 births 1973 deaths 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers 20th-century American musicians 20th-century African-American women writers 20th-century African-American writers