Wanda's Picks

In these conversations over the next year, we will speak to Black women about their motherlines. Our guest today is Kathryn Waddell Takara, Ph.D., who taught and developed the first Black Studies in the Ethnic Studies Department beginning in 1971. She transferred to Interdisciplinary Studies where she continued to develop new courses including Africana Studies. Her primary research was African American history, politics and culture. A winner of the (BCF) 2010 American Book Award, Kathryn Waddell Takara, PhD, poet, has published over 300 poems, 11 books of poetry and numerous academic articles. She is currently a writer and traveling performance poet since retiring from the University of Hawai'i (2007) after 31 years of teaching. She is recognized as a widely traveled professor, public scholar of ethnic and Africana Studies. She has travelled, taught and performed her poetry within the USA as well as in W. Europe, West and South Africa, and Eastern China. She was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, educated at Quaker George School and Tufts University on the East Coast, and studied in France twice. She earned a Fulbright scholarship, an M.A. in French from the University of California, Berkeley and moved to Hawai`i in 1968, where she earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai'i at Ma̵noa. She has been of service to the community as a coordinator and producer of many socio-political and cultural events. We end with Nina Simone, "To Be Young Gifted and Black."