Stories of the Underground Railroad with Vida Cross

Vida Cross is a Visiting Fulbright Research Chair who has come to the University of Windsor at the invitation of Leddy Library and the Black Scholars Institute. She has been conducting intensive research towards a creative writing project, focusing on Underground Railroad journeys to the Detroit River Borderlands and especially to Canadian communities in the region. Vida is a blues poet, a two-time Pushcart nominee, a Carl Sandburg Literary Award honoree and a Cave Canem Fellow. Vida’s work references her ancestry as a third generation Chigagoan as well as the work of Archibald J. Motley Jr. and Langston Hughes. Vida’s work has appeared in multiple journals and anthologies such as The Creativity and Constraint Anthology for Wising Up Press, A Civil Rights Retrospective with the Black Earth Institute, Tabula Poetica with Chapman University, Transitions Magazine at the Hutchinson Institute, the Cave Canem Anthology XII, The Literary Review with Fairleigh Dickinson University, Reed Magazine at Reed College, and The Journal of Film and Video from The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry collection Bronzeville at Night: 1949 was published by Avst Press in 2017. Vida Cross holds an MFA in Writing and an MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in English from Iowa State University and a BA from Knox College. She is a faculty member at Milwaukee Area Technical College and Chairperson of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission.

https://vidacross.com/bio

The Virtual Black History Presentation Vida recorded for the museum can be found here: https://youtu.be/BlMchbCSPYA?si=0_ca3rOOnfPt-6uy