Winona Addison

A true poet at heart, Winona Addison is no stranger to the arts community. She has performed spoken word at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and numerous street fairs in San Francisco throughout the years. Her passion for expression and self-empowerment was fueled while teaching poetry, intergenerational writing, and short story writing to inner city youth and immigrant women in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco and Oakland, California. She later sharpened her skills while interning with editors at Lee and Low Books, a publisher of children’s books, where she considered new works by authors and illustrators.

One of Winona’s greatest joy came from working with her husband, Kenneth Addison, a mixed-media artist and lifelong educator. She was instrumental in coordinating exhibits of Ken’s work with galleries and museums nationwide. She also collaborated with her husband on many projects in Bay Area schools and community centers. He used visual imagery and she integrated creative writing to teach language arts and gang prevention to children at risk. Two calendars of Ken’s work published by Tidemark Press Ltd., featured Winona’s poetry. Her poetry also appears in Voices Of Our Own, an anthology of oral histories and writings of mothers, daughters and elders of the Tenderloin. This book has been used by Temple University in Women Studies courses and other colleges across the country.

Twelve years ago, Winona embarked on a project consisting of interviews of nine African American women with different hairstyles entitled, The Creativity of Black Women’s Hair. When asked about their childhood memories concerning their hair, five of the nine women cried and revealed emotional and raw testimonies as they pondered and answered the question. The unearthing of memories provided those women with antidotes to cleanse and begin to heal after years of unknowing suppressing mixed emotions correlating to their hair. What began as a simple display and interview process about the creative flair of “black hair,” transformed into a self-pruning and examination of layered emotions that has rarely been examined as it pertains to childhood memories of African American females and their hair.

The project has been reborn and makes its debut as, HAIR MEMOIRS, PERSPECTIVES and UNSPOKEN TRUTHS: from black girlhood to Black Womanhood. This project engages in a collaborative of photography and narrative writing to capture and convey memory, life, and culture of African American females and their hair. The most powerful excerpts from their interviews are extracted and displayed in poetry form along with their portraits. This exhibit seeks to break down barriers to understand and illuminate personal and community identity by amplifying voices many times never heard before. It seeks to increase awareness of the joys, pains, humor, and embarrassment of childhood hair experiences that will encourage and foster open dialogue amongst all ethnic groups as it relates to their hair.

It is Winona’s sincere hope that this work will evoke and celebrate the source of empowerment and healing through the voices of African American girls and women and powerfully render the human experience through these images and written word.

This project is dedicated to the life and works of her life partner and creative muse, Kenneth Addison, who has become an inspirational force behind the direction of this project.