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Up Home: One Girl’s Journey
By Ruth J. Simmons

Saturday, October 26, 1pm
Location: SK Coffee
550 Vandalia Street, St. Paul

“I was born at a crossroads: a crossroads in history, a crossroads in culture, and a geographical crossroad
in North Houston County in East Texas.”

Born in 1945, Ruth J. Simmons grew up the twelfth child of sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, no electricity, no books to read. Yet despite this—or, in her words, because of it—Simmons would become the first Black president of an Ivy League university. The former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, Simmons has inspired generations of students as she herself made history.

In Up Home, Simmons takes us back to Grapeland to show how the people who love us when we are
young shape who we become. We meet her caring, tireless mother who managed to feed her large
family with an often-empty pantry; her father, who refused to let racial and economic injustice crush his
youngest daughter’s dreams; the doting brothers and sisters; and the attentive teachers who welcomed
Ruth into the classroom, guiding her to a future she could hardly imagine as a child.

Praise for Up Home

“Simmons’s evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“A riveting work of literature, destined to take its place in the canon of great African American autobiographies.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Bloomberg, BET