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Author,
Literary Activist
In Brief
Susan Follett is an advocate for using stories
to increase awareness of history and dismantle
the stereotypes that divide us. Having grown up
in the shadow and silence of Jim Crow—unaware of
the March from Selma scarcely 100 miles from her
hometown Meridian, Mississippi, where three
civil rights workers disappeared during Freedom
Summer—she set out to examine and reimagine the
times.
The
FOG MACHINE
was published in 2014 in commemoration of the
50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. As author
and public speaker, Susan shares Civil Rights
Movement history and her journey of discovery.
Her “Stories from Civil Rights History, Then and
Now” events help classrooms and communities
connect history to today. Her work explores
prejudice and what enables change. She lives in
St. Paul, MN.
* * *
Susan Follett grew up in the epicenter of the
civil rights movement: Mississippi in the
sixties. When the first African American stepped
into Highland Park’s public pool in Meridian on
the same day Neil Armstrong stepped onto the
moon, she was attending summer journalism camp
at the University of Mississippi. Her graduating
class at Meridian/Harris High School was the
first under federally mandated desegregation.
Armed with a masters’ degree in computer science
from Mississippi State University, she left
Mississippi. Her career in corporate technology
management began at the height of the women’s
movement and took her to the Twin Cities of
Minnesota, the Bay Area of California, and
Portland, Oregon.
A television documentary Ms. Follett saw as a
young adult, about the March from Selma to
Montgomery, haunted her, raising questions about
the time and place in which she grew up: Why
hadn’t she known the history? And what might be
different if she had?
Ultimately, she turned an adult eye on her
childhood during Jim Crow, interviewing Civil
Rights Movement veterans, historians, and
Mississippi residents.
The
FOG MACHINE
is the result of that research and reflection,
authentic historical fiction exploring prejudice
and what enables change.
Mississippi's McComb High and Washington's The
Overlake School adopted
The
FOG MACHINE
in an innovative pilot program for civil rights
education which concluded in April 2014. An
excerpt from
The FOG MACHINE is included
in Teaching Tolerance's Perspectives for a
Diverse America, an online anti-bias
curriculum.
Ms. Follett is a
2017 McKnight Fellow in Creative Prose. She lives in Minnesota with
her husband and two children and advocates for
inquiry-based civil rights education, enriched
by the use of story-based resources, toward the
goal of developing democratically patriotic
citizens. |
