Montgomery College Athenaeum Symposia Speakers Series presents, a spring 2025 virtual on February, 25th, 2025 event titled, “The importance of Our Stories: Past and Present” with the guest speaker and poet Glenis Redmond.

Poet Glenis Redmond first saw herself and her experiences represented in literature at age 10 when she read the poem “1,968 Winters”. Before that, she had never seen herself represented in literature, despite being an avid reader. This moment stayed with her and inspired her to pursue poetry as a career.

Glenis Redmond started off her career with a major in psychology and she was in the middle of a psychology program on a scholarship when she was dealing with changes in her life like being married and pregnant with twins, and she also realized that she was meant for something else. This is the story that many people go through, they start a career in something that they do not enjoy so that they can make a living. It takes courage to restart and do something that you enjoy.

Glenis Redmond faced many obstacles and was unsure if poetry was the right thing for her. When she was sick, her four year old daughter told her,” …well the Bible is nothing but a book of people living their story and if you are not living your story then you are alive.” Redmond states that was “on my precipice of going from counselor to poet.”

To this day, Glenis Redmond has written poetry, often freeform but sometimes structured. She is Greenville, South Carolina’s Inaugural Poet Laureate, Baldwin Fellow (2024–25), Poet Laureate Fellow (2023), and chosen to be a Citizen Diplomat with the Jonathan Green Maritime Cultural Center.

Redmond is an accomplished poet who has written several impactful poems about Black history and collective Black experiences. Redmond states, “I have been telling stories that I would have wanted to hear when I was in fifth grade along with ‘1,968 Winters’ .” For instance, she wrote a poem about her grandfather titled, “What my hands say”, and one eye-opening verse from the poem is “I worked this ground like it was my religion”. Her ancestors along with many other black people worked in cotton fields and this poem illuminates the remembrance of the struggles her grandfather and ancestors had to face while being a cotton picking machine.

One poem from her book, The Listening Skin is “Boy “. One verse is, “learns to dance with his head dunked or lowered, he knew either way they are coming for you.” The book overall explains “[her] parents’s connection and experience growing up in the segregated south and a bit about [their] migration story”

Redmond and her grandson “would go to parks; most of the parks we would go to would be confederate flags at the entry of where we had to go.” One verse of the poem is, “your light makes me lighter and makes the whole world brighter.” Glenis Redmond wrote this poem for her grandson, Julian, to encourage him to “ be an ultimate outsider whenever [he] goes.”

Redmond ends the webinar encouraging the audience, “So if anything I can state to you, is live your story, live your authentic story. You are the author, walk in the direction in which you pray and tell your story. You are needed and we are all needed.”

Redmond’s path to becoming a poet was not easy but she did it and she is an inspirational role model who shows that it is never too late to follow your dreams. Redmond has made a huge mark on poetry and highlights Black struggles and experiences along with what she wishes she heard when she was younger.