ABSTRACT
Coming to academia thinking of myself first and foremost as an artist (a poet, a painter, a writer), I pursued a teaching career as an avocation. My desire was to create art. This was a decision I made in childhood and I looked for the paths that would nurture and sustain this calling. College was the place where I would have time to study, to read, think, and learn, and I attended hoping it would empower me to be a thinking artist. My leaning toward art was directly related to my experience of the power of imagination. It was the imagination that fueled my hope as a young girl in a working-class Southern black home so that I would be able to create an artistic life for myself. The power of the imagination felt prophetic. In Mary Grey’s The Outrageous Pursuit of Hope she explains that “prophetic imagination is outrageous—not merely in dreaming the dream, but in already living out the dream before it has come to pass, and in embodying this dream in concrete action.” 186Individuals from marginalized groups, whether victimized by dysfunctional families or by political systems of domination, often find their way to freedom by heeding the call of prophetic imaginations.
