Rose Marshall

Rose Marshall wrote her first poem growing up on a farm in segregated rural Mississippi of the ‘50s. Today she has written anthologies, contributed to several published works, and has had her writing published in several anthologies.

Ms. Marshall was born November 2, 1947 in Silver Creek, Mississippi. She received her B.A. from Tougaloo College where her creating writing teacher was poet Audre Lorde. Lorde influenced Marshall’s decision to think about writing as a career, telling her, after Marshall showed her some poetry she had written, “Little black girl, you have the soul of a writer.”

Marshall’s first poetry chapbook was published in 2004, and she currently has another book of poetry ready for publication.

Davis recently commented: "What do I use as inspiration for my poetry? Everything! I grew up in the segregated Mississippi of the 1950s and 1960s--when Medger Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was murdered during the fight for human and civil rights, where Emmet Till was killed and mutilated, and where countless men and women were jailed and beaten trying to gain rights guaranteed by their constitution.”

An author who has had an influential impact on Marshall is Zora Neale Hurston. She constantly reads and studies Hurston’s novels, short stories, and folklore. Marshall states, “The more I learned about her, the more I learned that she and I are much alike--from the closet full of hats to our simple irreverence to our 'differentness' to our love of the South to our sassy mouths!” Additionally, she wrote a Hurston bibliography: Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide (1997).