The Howard County Poetry and Literature Society this year celebrates its 50th anniversary of presenting nationally— and internationally— renowned literary artists and emerging writers to our local and worldwide audiences. In that half-century of service to the community, we at HoCoPoLitSo are perhaps most proud of our youth- and student-focused offerings, and our enduring partnerships with Howard County schools going back to our founding in 1974. Each year, HoCoPoLitSo invites an active professional writer to participate in a residency in Howard County, visiting county students for readings and workshops in their classrooms. More than 30 authors of diverse backgrounds have taken part in what is today the Bauder Writer-in-Residence program, offering visits to all 13 Howard County public high schools, the Homewood Center, and Howard Community College.

This year’s writer-in-residence, Tope Folarin, kicked off his season of presentations for the 2024–2025 academic year on August 19th, at Howard County Public Schools’ Professional Learning Day, speaking to an engaged audience of professional educators on the winding path that led him to find his literary voice, and his excitement to help young aspiring writers find their own. Susan Thornton Hobby, HoCoPoLitSo’s recording secretary, attended the session and penned the following.

Author Tope Folarin describes parts of his life as “the craziest kind of whiplash.” Here’s just a little of his life story, which he told to county English teachers and others at their professional development day on August 19 as part of his introduction as this year’s Bauder Writer-in-Residence.

Folarin’s Nigerian parents move to Utah, where he and his brother are born. His mother falls ill and returns to Nigeria and the Folarin boys spend their early years in a mostly White, mostly Mormon area, being raised by their father. Soon they were moving across the country following their father’s search for a job.

Folarin wins a scholarship to Morehouse University. After a semester in Capetown, he loses his scholarship on a technicality and survives on friends’ couches. One day, watching Spike Lee’s Malcom X movie from one of those couches, he notices a list of funders in the credits and writes appeal letters to every one. Oprah Winfrey responds and pays for him to complete his senior year at Morehouse.

After earning two master’s degrees (Public Policy and African Studies) at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, Folarin writes a thesis on the immigrant experience, which makes its way to a friend-of-a-friend at Google. Folarin is hired and works for two years at Google. In his free time he writes about his childhood, eventually realizing that his writing “wants” to be a novel about a young Nigerian man raised in Utah. He quits his job at Google to focus on fiction and racks up 543 rejections for his work. He shoves a short story into the hands of a writer he’s interviewing, who submits the story to a contest. Folarin wins the Caine Prize for African Writing. Then his semi-autobiographical novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, wins the Whiting Prize for Fiction.

Whiplash, indeed.

HoCoPoLitSo has brought more than 30 renowned authors into Howard County schools, in an effort to show students that authors are real people. Folarin, who is now the executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies, as well as the Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer at Georgetown University, couldn’t be more real.

Now, he’ll be talking with students about writing, about his life, and about finding their own voices, like he found his. “All your life is grist,” Folarin told the teachers. He’d like to tell their students how to write their own compelling stories. “I support the idea of radical freedom when you’re writing.”

To learn more about the writer-in-residence, or to schedule a visit to your own classroom, please contact HoCoPoLitSo’s High School Liaison Judy Young, at judy_young@hcpss.org, or contact the HoCoPoLitSo offices at info@hocopolitso.org, or by phone, (443)518-4568 during regular business hours. An interview with Folarin will be published in January in the Little Patuxent Review.