Molly Lynn Watt

Molly Lynn Watt is a poet, activist, and educator who worked at The Highlander Center in Tennessee in 1963. Her most recent book, "On Wings of Song--A Journey into the Civil Rights Era" (Ibbetson Street 2014) is a memoir in poems of her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement with her husband and two young daughters. The family supervises a workcamp to build a voter registration training facility in the Smokey Mountains with 15 black activists from Birmingham and 15 white volunteers from the north. In the middle of the night the group are taken at gun point to the Maryville Jail, including her daughters ages 1 and 3. This is a personal story of where the personal meets the political in America, a story of courage and shame. The books starts during the World War II and concludes in 2014.

Watt co-authored with her husband Daniel Lynn Watt, and they perform the play "George and Ruth -- Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War" also available on CD from Amazon. She published a limited edition chapbook of a persona poem "Consider This" with an incest theme, commissioned and choreographed by Joan Green for an Across the Ages Dance Concert. Her poem "Civil Rights Update" is paired with Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech as required reading in Dallas Public Schools. A prior book of poems, "Shadow People" (Ibbetson Street Press 2007). She is primarily a witness poet leading the poet's life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, giving readings, leading workshops, doing guest appearances in schools, publishing and hanging out with The Bagel Bards for whom she edited their first four Bagel Bard anthologies. She and her husband play in a ukulele band, keep up with educational currents through the Scratch community and live in a co-housing community they co-founded with two dozen others by consensus.

Advanced Praise for Molly Lynn Watt's new book, "On Wings of Song"...

... flies over Democracy's strange and bitter crop; a Baltimore Postman delivers the news: Read All About It!

--Bob Moses, Director of SNCC's Mississippi Project 1961-1964

... is a journey into the heart, the place of deep caring for the state of being human. Watt has written with the sincere and sympathetic hand to mark a path for the reader to return to the Civil Rights Era of the 50's and 60's, a history that never leaves us. As she writes, "there is no time for fear". In the inscape of her journey we see the time for caring is now. These are gentle but sure lines of conviction, lines worthy of a standing applause.

--Afaa M. Weaver, "The Plum Flower Trilogy"

... foregrounds one family's experience against a choral background of history scored for multiple voices, both lyrical and documentary. Out of what she calls "a minor episode", Watt has created a major contribution to our emotional understanding of the Civil Rights movement. You will find this account both informative and deeply moving; you will not be able to put it down, except to ponder what you have just read.

--Martha Collins, "Blue Front" & "White Papers"

... offers an important reminder that history isn't just an abstraction. Like a play narrated by multiple characters, these poems show the profound impact the ongoing struggle for Civil Rights had on the lives of ordinary people. With grace and skill, and a fine-tuned ear, the poet illuminates the tragedies and triumphs of America's march toward the still-elusive goal of racial equality. Ultimately this collection is testimony to the dignity and resiliency of the human spirit.

-- Charles Coe, "Picnic on the Moon" & "All Sins Forgiven: Poems for My Parents"

... is a deeply moving memoir rendered in a collection of poems. It is an account of the vicissitudes of a courageous woman and her young family in the context of the social and political turmoil that transformed the United States in the latter half of the 20th century. Her unflinching recovery of the intimate details of their day-to- day lives as they journeyed through the racial strife of the 1960s is a stellar achievement. Repulsed by the whites only imperative in Tennessee, Watt engages "in a long skirmish to end Jim Crow". Her poems sing "songs to freedom's beat".

--Florence Ladd, "Is That Your Child?" & "The Spirit of Josephine"

... explores a subject that most white and African-American poets avoid; but race, guilt and atonement are an important aspect of American history, brought to light with considerable clarity and truth.

--Sam Cornish, "An Apron Full of Beans" & "Cross a Parted Sea"

... does a marvelous job juxtaposing the personal with the political to reveal the ways those worlds intersect.

--Pam McMichael, Director of Highlander Center