Born shortly after World War I, Adele Holden grew up in the segregated world known simply as “The Shore”—an isolated patchwork of counties wedged between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

She and her four siblings had extraordinary parents, who vowed they would let “nothing on this earth” keep them from making a better quality of life for their children through education. With her parent’s support, Holden struggled to get that education and emerged with a BS from Morgan State University. Adele started taking classes at Johns Hopkins University and soon amassed enough poems to publish her only other book, Figurine and Other Poems, in 1961. She received letters of praise from Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Josephine Jacobsen, Gordon Parks, and President John F. Kennedy. Based on the strength of the work in Figurine, Adele was awarded a full fellowship at Hopkins’ prestigious Writing Seminars, from which she graduated with a MA in 1965.

Her distinguished career included long stints teaching English at Dunbar High School—where she was honored as “Dunbar’s Poet”—and as a Professor of English at the Baltimore Junior College (now Baltimore City Community College), from which she retired in 1982. Adele is the author of Down on the Shore.