LaWanda Dickens remembers nights as a child in Brookhaven, Mississippi, sitting in her bedroom while reading and writing.
Back then, when she would recite her works, her audience was made up of one person: her mother. “In my community, what talent looked like to me was dribbling a basketball or singing or dancing, and I didn’t have any of those skills,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “Nobody ever told me that I held in my hand something that builds corporations. I didn’t know the value of it.”
It wasn’t until she attended college that she felt validated in her artistic ambitions.
“I’ve always been a writer, but I didn’t know that I was a writer until I made it to Jackson State and I took my first composition course under Dr. Brenda Anderson. I’ll never forget her,” Dickens said.
She recalled how the professor, impressed by the way Dickens put stories together, pulled her aside one day after class and urged her to write for the campus newspaper.
“I started out (majoring) in history. By the end of that second semester, I changed my major to English,” Dickens remembered. “It was my encounter with her that was just life-changing.”
‘Knowledge Is Discouraged’
As she explains it, LaWanda Dickens “felt like a fish out of water” growing up in Mississippi because of what she felt were “one-dimensional views of what it means to be a Black, rural Mississippian.”
“I was often told that I didn’t look, act or talk like I was from Mississippi,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “Our culture and history, especially our literary contributions, are too brilliant for us to box ourselves in.”
She moved away in 1994 and turned her love of writing into her own teaching career.
Caring for her elderly parents, however, brought her back home to Mississippi, where she found a new role teaching English courses at Jackson State University, where she remains today.
But she had more to give.
Three years after returning home, Dickens founded the Magnolia Literacy Project, named after the state flower, with the hope of bringing readers and writers—young and old—together.
The organization’s initiatives include publishing the works of both adult and teen authors and arranging literary events for children. Dickens also facilitates the Blossoms Mother-Daughter Reading Club with project manager and Murrah High School librarian Courtney Holmes.
“I wanted to create something for kids like me and help them discover their talent and what they can do with that,” Dickens said. The organization aims to support emerging Black writers and foster intergenerational connections through literacy.
As someone who spent her formative years leisurely reading and writing, Dickens also wants to combat what she sees today as a societal shift toward anti-intellectualism. “Knowledge is discouraged. Being connected to the world and understanding where your place is in the world, all of that is being undermined right now,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
“There is a dismantling of systems that our ancestors and people who look like us fought to put in place for us,” she continued. “And books—really any kind of text—that help us to understand who we are, that places emphasis on our cultural values and significance. That’s necessary right now.”
Researchers have found that American literacy rates are on the decline for both children and adults, despite studies showing how recreational reading increases comprehension skills and cognition, attention span and empathy for others.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported in its 2025 Nation’s Report Card declines in average reading scores for school-aged children.
In a September 2025 conversation among Harvard University professors about the declining literacy rates, Pamela Mason, the co-chair of the Teaching and Teacher Leadership Program at HGSE, said she saw Mississippi as a bright spot for literacy improvement and suggested that more adults should model reading for leisure to their children.
“When do our children see us reading for pleasure, see us laugh at something we’ve read, see us engaged?” Mason said. “Like, ‘No, don’t bother me right now; I’m in the middle of this chapter. I’ll talk to you later.’ Even in schools, when we have ‘drop everything and read’ time, the teachers should be reading rather than using that time to grade. So I think that it’s both the screen and the technology time, but also it’s the modeling that literacy is important in our daily lives.”
‘Doing What I Was Meant to Do’
LaWanda Dickens said founding the Magnolia Literacy Project renewed her hope in the changes she could make back at home. That mission is exemplified in the Magnolia Literacy Project’s mother-daughter reading club, Courtney Holmes, the organization’s project manager, told the Mississippi Free Press.
Holmes said she has witnessed how the group gives space for high-school and college-aged women and their mothers to have conversations they may not have otherwise had.
“Mothers and daughters, we have conversations but sometimes we hear each other, but we don’t hear each other,” she explained. “So (in the book club) have the opportunity to say ‘OK, I didn’t know’ or ‘I didn’t process that at the time.’”
“In our meetings we would go past time trying to discuss everything that we were feeling after reading some of these passages,” she continued. “I feel like there’s not enough of those conversations. (It felt like), finally, we can talk about this in a safe space with common-minded people and just listen to everybody’s viewpoint.”
Holmes, who participates in the reading group with her own daughter, said the experience is transformative. “I think everybody walked away from each year of doing this so much better off being able to touch on growing up Black in America, complex family relationships and community relationships,” she explained.
The group meets virtually every other Saturday from September to April, reading and discussing books like “Perfect Black” by Crystal Wilkinson and “Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America” by Taiyon J. Coleman. This year, the cohort is reading through excerpts from “Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.”
The group comes together in person every year for the National African American Read-In, hosted locally at Jackson State University, to commemorate National Poetry Month every April and an awards ceremony to close out the season.
Even when they graduate from high school, many of the girls return to participate in the reading club, she added.
Dickens thinks the mother-daughter reading club will take a hiatus after this year as she develops new ventures like a poetry club for older Black women and publishing the works of other local writers.
She takes pride in mentoring up-and-coming Mississippi authors, as her former college professor, Dr. Brenda Anderson, did for her. “I’ve been able to get out into communities and engage in ways that I wouldn’t ordinarily have,” she said. “(I see) myself in a lot of the young creatives that I’m working with and you know, hearing feedback from them and the mothers. … I just feel like I’m doing what I was meant to do.”
To learn more about how to get involved with the Magnolia Literacy Project or to donate to the nonprofit, contact LaWanda Dickens at 601-317-2126.
Know a Mississippian you believe deserves some public recognition? Nominate them for a potential Person of the Day article at mfp.ms/pod.
LaWanda Dickens occasionally contributes to the MFP Voices section.