Uncrowned Community Builders

Rose Parkman Davis Marshall was born on a farm in southern Mississippi, but has resided in Columbia, South Carolina for the last nine years. An expert on the life and works of Zora Neale Hurston, her book, Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide, was published by Greenwood Press in 1997. She is completing an update entitled Zora Neale Hurston: A Decade of New Scholarship which is due out in late 2009. Rose holds a bachelors of arts degree in English from Tougaloo College, a masters of science degree in English literature from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a masters of library and information studies degree from the University of Alabama. She was also an exchange student at Brown University in 1967.

Rose began her career as an instructor of freshman composition at Jackson State College in 1970. After a six-year stint in Boston, she returned to Mississippi where she taught English and directed the writing center at Tougaloo College. Other positions held over the years include: coordinator of community arts program for the city of Jackson, Mississippi (1985-87), designer and coordinator of Neighborhood Arts Jubilee (1988), and planner for the Governor's Awards in the Arts and the Governor's Conference on the Arts for the Mississippi Arts Commission (1987-88). Rose returned to school in 1988 and has worked as a reference librarian and library instruction coordinator at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi and at Mississippi State University--where she also a veterinary medicine librarian. She moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1995 to teach at Winthrop University, and in 2000 she married and moved to Columbia to work at the University of South Carolina where she proposed and taught a one-credit hour information literacy course. In 2003, the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs gave her its Lifelong Commitment to the Pursuit of Scholarship and Excellence award. She transferred to the Aiken campus of the University of South Carolina where she received the student-nominated Woman of Impact Award in 2008.

Rose's areas of expertise are information literacy, library instruction, and genealogy/researching family histories. She writes poetry, short stories, book reviews, and articles for scholarly journals as well as proofs and edits manuscripts for novice writers, ministers, and dissertation candidates. She wrote the chapter on library research in Your College Experience: Strategies for Success edited by John N. Gardner. This text book is used by more than a million students in First Year classes across the country. Rose also researched both sides of her family and published two family histories: The Family History of Richard (Ex-Slave) and Mary Bridges Parkman in 2005 and The Genealogy of James Houston & Mattie Moore Oatis in 2006. Unbuckle My Soul is a poetry chapbook Rose self-published in 2004, and her poem "Strong Women" is in an anthology entitled Out of the Rough: Women's Poems of Survival and Celebration edited by Dorothy Perry Thompson in 2001. She also wrote the introduction to Thompson's collection of poems, Hurrying the Spirit: Following Zora. Finally, Blessed, Blessed, Blessed is a compilation of scriptures by subject which Rose freely gives to all who requests the pamphlet.

As a motivational and academic presenter, Rose speaks on these topics: Growing Up in the Segregated South; Zora Neale Hurston: Contradictory, Controversial, and Unique; Information Literacy Skills for a Lifetime; Online and Print Resources for Bible Study; Ecclesiastical Apartheid; and Dust off the Family Bible: Get Started Researching Your Family History.

The following excerpt is from Rose's biographical essay in volume 175 of Contemporary Authors (and online in the Literature Resources from Gale database):

Though I never studied her work in college, Hurston is a writer I greatly admire. I read and re-read her novels, stories, and folk tales all the time. However, it was my creative writing teacher, Audre Lorde, who influenced my decision to think about writing. It was to her I went in secret one afternoon to share a poem I had written the previous fall. This woman who was just publishing her first book of poetry--looked at the skinny girl-child who timidly passed her a hand-written poem, read it, looked me in the eye and said, 'Little black girl, you have the soul of a writer.' I still remember how I felt that afternoon. In my mind's eye, I can still feel my shoulders straightening, can hear the breath leaving my open mouth, can smell the pride I felt that a New York poet believed I had talent."

I am finally writing again--long entries in journals which I hope to turn into poems. My soul is finally ready! I am also collaborating with a friend to turn our bizarre family histories into a novel--the story of a Catawba Indian/African American man who meets a mulatto/African-American woman in the early 1900s."

At present, Rose is also completing a series of poems from scripture inspired by her daughter and based on Habakkuk 2:1-3:

1 I will stand my watch and set myself on the rampart, and watch to see what He will say to me, and what I will answer when I am corrected. 2 Then the LORD answered me and said: Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it. 3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie. Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. (Emphasis added)

Rose is past president of the Disability Action Center board of directors and a member of Zion Baptist Church where she teaches adult Sunday school and serves on the newsletter committee. On her campus, she chairs the Intercultural Events Committee and serves on the committee reviewing the general education core requirements. Rose also works with the annual African-American History Quiz Bowl competition and writes African-American Facts 101" - short bios posted around campus during February. She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and has served as advisor to chapters on several campuses. The mother of five adult children (Julian, Lumba, Jelani, Aubrey, and Kevin) and grandmother to 10 children who call her Grandma Rose," she loves to read, play Scrabble, watch Jeopardy, study the Bible, travel, and surf the web.