When you listen to the 23-year-old Atlanta songwriter’s poised and plainspoken albums, you can hear why: she channels emotions that are so aching, they seem to be coming into existence at that very moment. It was a vibrant neighborhood, a loving neighborhood, where neighbors were like kinfolk.Faye Webster loves the feeling of a first take: writing a song, then heading to the studio with her band to track it live the very next day. It was all Black, but you had all these disparate people from different professions living together. Meanwhile, Duncan's childhood Wellington Street neighborhood in South Memphis was populated with yet more principals and teachers - not to mention politicians and police officers, cab drivers and domestics. (Duncan's husband, businessman Michael Thompson, also comes from a family of educators.) Her mother, Earline Duncan, 85, was a city schools teacher (in fact, she was the first Black teacher at Snowden), while her father, the late Kenneth Duncan, was a Vietnam veteran and high school ROTC instructor.
MEMPHIS NEWS: National Civil Rights Museum announces launch of Corporate Equity Center Growing up in South Memphisĭuncan's interest in education is no surprise. The other, with illustrations by Charly Palmer, is "Evicted! The Struggle for the Right to Vote," from Calkins Creek Books.īLACK HISTORY MONTH IN MEMPHIS: Stax Museum looks to pass on record label's legacy with Black History Month programming Published by Thomas Nelson, a subsidiary of HarperCollins, "Opal Lee" is only one of two picture books from Duncan that debuted in January. THE FOUR WAY: New mural honors the past and present of landmark Memphis restaurant 'The road to critical thinking is books'Īfter a fast start followed by a slow stretch, Duncan lately has found more acceptance than rejection.
This writing career has been three decades of rejection, sweetheart, but I'm writing creatively on every day the good Lord makes available to me."īLACK HISTORY IN MEMPHIS: 5 landmarks you should know and the stories behind them "But here is the beautiful thing about teaching school: You get off at 3 o'clock, and you have every weekend to yourself. "At some point I resigned myself to the idea that I was going to spend my life working," she said. But she soon learned that making a living by writing children's books was not as easy as one, two, three, or even one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.
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