25 Women for 2023: Professor Maxine Montgomery promotes literacy around the community

Dr. Maxine Montgomery answers the phone like a woman who knows what she is talking about. Her authoritative voice is commanding, yet friendly, and she is as comfortable discussing Literary Studies as baking, gardening, and traveling internationally.

Her wisdom, scholarship, and impact on the students and others she interacts with have earned her a place on this year’s list of Tallahassee’s 25 Women You Need to Know.

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“I have lived in Tallahassee off and on for many years,” she says, and my return to Tallahassee in 1988 marks a full-circle moment as I came back to my alma mater after spending two years as a faculty member at the University of Nebraska.” She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois and now serves as a professor of English at Florida State University, last year earning the designation of Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor. “That means so much to me because it is awarded by peers,” she says.

She will not tell you this part, but she also won the Distinguished Research Professor Award that same year, earning the distinction of being the only professor in Florida State’s history to win both awards during the same award cycle.

“Teaching and writing are my twin passions. I enjoy introducing students to works by African American writers and writing about those texts in illuminating little-known or understudied aspects of the tradition,” she says, reflecting on her 30-plus year career. “I am inspired to do my work when I realize the scarcity of tenured Black women professors in academia and the need for role models who inspire the emerging generation of writers and scholars.”

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While her professional work has taken place within university walls Montgomery also works outside of academic spaces, promoting literacy among under-served members of the community and helping others gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for African American Literature and Culture.

Her lively book discussions on author Toni Morrison at local libraries, high schools, colleges, and sorority meetings illuminate the writing of understudied authors and draws attention to the broad assortment of literary texts by Black authors among members of marginalized communities.

As a result, she is a highly sought after public speaker at churches, civic groups, fraternal organizations, and city-wide events, inspiring her audience to appreciate the contributions of writers whose works are often excluded or misunderstood in relation to the works of mainstream writers.

Last year, she co-organized a two-day conference featuring nationally recognized Morrison scholars from Howard University and the University of Missouri, including lectures, book giveaways, discussions, and a screening of “The Pieces I Am,” a documentary on the life and work of Toni Morrison. Some of those events took place in the city’s southside neighborhood, where the greatest impact for literacy advocacy could be made.

In 2022, she was among an elite group of only 13 scholars nationwide receiving a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for “Engaging Black Women’s Archives: Gloria Naylor and Twentieth Century Literary History.” That grant enabled the digitization of Naylor’s unpublished papers at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the publication of a two-volume collection of new critical essays on Naylor and the archives.

Montgomery is the author or editor of seven books, including her most recent work, "The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination." She also received four university teaching awards.

It is all just part of the job, she says, calling on a family legacy of service to the community. “Along with my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel and Mollie Montgomery, my three older sisters have been an inspirational influence. They instilled within me a desire to achieve and to make a positive contribution to the community,” she says.

Montgomery is at home in a college town and says that her favorite aspect of life in Tallahassee is being immersed in a rich cultural and intellectual environment with FSU and Florida A&M Universities. Her full circle return to Tallahassee is the perfect representation of the bridge that Montgomery builds between scholarship, teaching, and culture, and the future of how we understand each other.

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: 25 Women: Maxine Montgomery promotes literacy inside, outside academia