Doris Davenport Tributes
1. Tribute to doris davenport by one of her sisters, Maggie Davenport
2. Dr. doris davenport: Poet Activist Who Taught Us, by Jeanine DrJazz Normand
3. Spotlight tribute dedicated to Dr. doris davenport in April 2025 on the SLFA Herstory Project website:
Dr. doris davenport: Poet Activist Who Taught Us
Doris Davenport, aka doris davenport, was an artist, dancer, essayist, PhD scholar, performance poet, educator,
photographer, and thinker, who focused her abundant energy on poetry and education.
May her passion and activism inspire us all. Dr. doris davenport is deeply missed by everyone whose lives she touched.
Her work has been grounded in the South. Born in Gainesville, Georgia, in January 1949, and died in December, 2024, Dr. doris davenport often mentioned her life growing up in the Appalachian foothills, and Appalachia inspired her.
Calling herself an Afrilachian, she identified as African American, Appalachian, Feminist, and LGBTQ, which innately influenced her life’s work. In recent years, she had been working, writing, and teaching in Georgia and Alabama. At the end, she returned to her beloved northeast Georgia to retire. After her death, her family wrote, “As per her wishes, her remains will be scattered in the traditional Cherokee Homelands, euro-colonized Northeast Georgia, on Tower (Chenocetah) Mountain and Mt. Yonah.”
Dr. doris davenport famously wrote many times in her essays about how white women were dismissive of her, including in this famous and insightful one: “The Pathology of Racism: A Conversation with Third World Wimmin,” appearing in the groundbreaking book, This Bridge Called My Back, which recently issued in 2021 a fortieth anniversary edition.
Dr. doris davenport published thirteen books of poetry, several of which are available on Amazon and Kindle, as well as at Charis Books and More.
In addition, she has published multiple journal articles, essays, and poems in various publications and collections.
Read this tribute in full, and read more tributes here: She Who Will Be Remembered.
NOTE: If you would like to write a remembrance, please send it to us by email at:
slfaherstoryproject@gmail.com
4. Spotlight tribute in March 2025 on the SLFA Herstory Project website included doris davenport.
March is Women’s History Month, and this year we are celebrating by launching a new feature, “Remembering Lesbians,” a page for stories about Southern lesbians we have lost and who are not forgotten.
We have already published remembrances of writers Shay Youngblood, Terri Lynn Jewell; novelist and publisher June Arnold; disability rights activist Betty Bird; as well as an interview with the Herstory Project’s own writer and oral historian, Barbara Esrig.
At the end of 2024, within scarcely a month, we lost three significant Southern lesbian writers. Bestselling novelist Dorothy Allison died in California on November 5, 2024, age 75; poet doris davenport (who preferred her name lowercase) died in Georgia on December 2, 2024, age 75; and renowned “poet and provocateur,” Nikki Giovanni, died in Virginia on December 9, 2024, age 81. All three died of cancer.
Southern scholar and antiracism author Mab Segrest remembers her friend Dorothy Allison with a personal story of her last conversations with Allison. Poet doris davenport is remembered by one of her younger sisters, Maggie Davenport. Our Nikki Giovanni remembrance comes from Winn, who met the poet in 2021 when Giovanni spoke in Birmingham, “the Tragic City,” where Giovanni would not have been allowed to speak when she began her activism with the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Read about them at She Who Will Be Remembered.