Honored English professor retiring from Richmond

After working at the University of Richmond for 20 years, English professor Daryl Dance is retiring this spring, but be careful when mentioning the word retirement around her. "I want to make it clear, that what we're calling retirement and talking about as retirement, I don't look at as retirement in that sense of the word," she said. "I've got a lot on the agenda."

Dance is known in the English community as the "Dean of Folkculture," according to the New York State Writers Institute. She grew up in Charles City, Va. and was a member of a highly educated family. She inherited her passion for writing from her mother, who worked as a teacher, and her grandmother who also loved to write, she said. "Even as a child, I remember writing and sending plays into the radio," Dance said.

Her childhood influenced the subjects she explored and studied through her books and the courses she has taught. Charles City was a place rich with black folk culture and served as one of the reasons she was so interested the topic, Dance said.

Before teaching at Richmond, Dance worked as an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University for 20 years. James Kinney, the chairman of the VCU English department while Dance worked there, said Dance helped him with a book he was working on. "I was very interested among other things in the issue of race in American literature," he said. "She certainly was an authority on a lot of things related to that, and so I considered her a very valuable colleague in terms of talking with her."

Dance focused her studies on Caribbean literature, African American folklore and African American literature, which were areas of study that were in their early stages of development when she began her research, she said. She said that she was proud of the way she got to help shape these fields through her influence over what would be published and is excited by the way they have grown and developed.

"At the time I started in each of these fields, I quickly felt myself something of an authority because I was able to read the major writers and scholarship out there," she said. "I can't keep up anymore. There's so much coming up, and that's rewarding and also frustrating."

When Dance left VCU as the result of a retirement package offered by the government, Kinney said he was devastated. Dance was the only tenured African American member of the department and a respected colleague and scholar, Kinney said.

"She was one of the most prolific and important people in the department as far as her scholarly publications went," he said. "She also was a very dedicated teacher and she made herself available, especially to a lot of black students that didn't have very many other black faculty members back in that period to serve as mentors or as role models or anything."

The impact that Dance had on her students and those who read her works are what she considers to be her proudest accomplishments, she said.

"When I pick up a book a student has written and see myself acknowledged, that's wonderful," she said. "Or even when a student writes to me at the end of the semester and says, 'I loved your class. I'd never been exposed to this literature before.'"

Jack Wright, a junior who is in Dance's seminar, The Caribbean Novel, said: "Something that I really like about her that I think is rare among English professors especially, is that she's way more open-minded to other people's perspectives on things. Like she'll never discount something someone says as just 'Oh you're just interpreting it wrong.'"

On the first day of class, Dance allowed her class to review the syllabus and offer changes, Wright said. "She's not the dictator who's just all powerful and her word goes and that's that," he said. "It's a much more, community-based class where everybody gets a say, and it means just as much as the next person."

Jose Martinez, a junior who is also in Dance's seminar this semester, said, "I think she pushes you to be what an English major should be, where you derive conclusions from the sources given."

Both Martinez and Wright said that Dance knew the material she taught so well it forced them to read the texts more thoroughly and avoid coming to class unprepared, noting if a student fumbled through a comment or attempted to get away without having read the novels, Dance would know.

Dance said she still hesitated to call herself a writer, but she has released eight books, received five fellowships and won nine grants over the past 50 years.

One of the works published by Dance, "Honey Hush," was a book about black women's humor, she said, and she had been blessed with positive responses to her work. "Women have written me from all over the place saying things like, 'This book is my Bible,'" she said. "One person wrote and said, 'Every night I read a few pieces from 'Honey Hush' before I go to sleep, and then I wake up in the morning with a smile on my face.'"

After leaving Richmond, Dance's plans include: working on two manuscripts, teaching occasionally, working on committees, reviewing works and remaining on several journal boards. Dance has three children and two grandchildren and looks forward to being able to spend more time with them, she said. She may be retiring, but she will not stop working, exploring or inspiring.

Contact staff writer Maria Rajtik at maria.rajtik@richmond.edu