I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb

About the Authors and Contributors

170 About the Authors and Contributors For more than 20 years, Betty Press has photographed in East and West Africa, including eight years as an international photojournalist while she lived in Nairobi, Kenya. She has been widely published and exhibited. Currently, she is an adjunct professor of photography at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg and is married to Bob Press. Her photographs were featured in The New Africa: Dispatches from a Changing Continent by Robert M. Press/ Photographs by Betty Press, University Press of Florida. It received The Best of the Best from the University Presses - 2000 book award. Annetta Miller, an American citizen, is a musician and a lover and collector of African proverbs. Born and raised in Tanzania, she has spent her entire working life in Tanzania, Sudan, and, since 1974, in Kenya, where she is currently retired. She is married to Harold Miller and they have two grown sons. Proverbs in Africa are dynamic and are considered to be lodged and exercised in the public domain. These pithy sayings reflect and impart generationally-tested cultural wisdom and values. Proverbs in this book have been selected from Annetta Miller’s personal collection of more than 100,000, derived from numerous oral and written sources during more than 60 years of living in Africa. She has produced six roto flip calendars featuring thematically-categorized proverbs, and is the author of Sharing Boundaries: Learning the Wisdom of Africa. Resources for further study are: African Proverb Series, University of South Africa, Unisa Press and African Proverbs Project at www.afriprov.org. Joanne Veal Gabbin is the Executive Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, founder and organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective, and Professor of English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A widely-published author, dedicated teacher and scholar, she has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching, scholarship and leadership. She is married to Dr. Alexander Gabbin and has one daughter, Jessea Nayo Gabbin. Alison Nordström is Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, the oldest and largest museum of photography in the United States. She was the Founding Director and Senior Curator of the Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Florida from 1991 to 2002. She has curated over 100 exhibitions of photography. At George Eastman House, she has initiated the contemporary biennial Vital Signs, and has curated Paris: Photographs by Eugene Atget and Christopher Rauschenberg, Why Look at Animals?, and Know War. She writes and lectures extensively on contemporary and historical photography. Christiana Chinwe Okechukwu, Professor at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland is a widely-published author whose works include Achebe the Orator: The Art of Persuasion in Chinua Achebe’s Novels. As an Ogidi woman from the same traditional Igbo village as Achebe, Okechukwu has special insights into the world portrayed in Achebe’s novels. She is the executive director of Broadening the Horizon for at-risk youths: Inwelle Study and Resource Centre, Enugu, Nigeria www. inwelle.org. ...