ABSTRACT
Born in New York City, Ford recalls that she was a “dreamy child” with her head always buried in a book. She grew up on Long Island, the child of an interracial couple. Both parents were deeply involved in the civil rights movement; her mother, an African American, and her father, a child of Russian/Polish immigrants, instilled in her and her brother and sister a strong sense of identity and Black pride. She credits her cousin, the playwright, director, and actor Douglas Turner Ward—founder of the Negro Ensemble Company in the mid-1960s—with inspiring her to pursue a career in publishing. She remembers how proud she was in junior high school when he elected to display her review of one of the NEC’s earliest productions on the theater’s bulletin board for months.
