Alice Faye Duncan never forgets a teacher’s name. A conversation with her is sprinkled with the names of educators who influenced her, perhaps because Duncan herself worked as a librarian in Memphis Shelby County Schools for 30 years, following in both her parents’ footsteps. “I am the child of two African-American schoolteachers,” she says. “My mama is Earline Duncan, and she was one of the first Black educators to integrate the faculty at Snowden School. My father is Sgt. Kenneth Duncan, and it is because of them that I am who I am.”
Who she is: A Memphis-born, Memphis-based educator, poet, and author of a wealth of children’s books, including Yellow Dog Blues, Coretta’s Journey, Opal Lee and What It Means To Be Free, and Honey Baby Sugar Child, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in print this year. Duncan says her parents’ book collection called to her long before she could read on her own, imparting to her a certain reverence for the written word.
Duncan recalls her mother reading aloud to her when she was a young child, until she learned to read on her own in Betty S. Johnson’s first-grade class. Reveling in her hard-earned independence, Duncan scoured her parents’ bookshelves for books she could read by herself.
“From there, the only books on the bookshelves that I was able to decode and somewhat understand were poetry books by Langston Hughes, by Maya Angelou, by Gwendolyn Brooks,” she says. “They were spare, there’s a lot of white space, and I could decode the words,” Duncan remembers. “So I have loved poetry ever since I was a small child.”
By second grade, Duncan was composing her own poems. In sixth grade, a published poet was a guest speaker in her class (that’s Wanda Fee’s English class, for anyone who doubts Duncan’s recall of influential educators). Phyllis Tickle of Poets & Writers magazine escorted that poet, Etheridge Knight, to the class. Knight considered himself the literary son of Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the poets who corresponded with him while he was in prison and even helped him land his first poetry contract. This made Knight another link between Duncan and one of her early idols, Brooks, whose poetry had helped a young Duncan along the road to an appreciation of literature.
Knight, a Black man, reminded Duncan of her cousin, her father, her grandfather. “Wow, here’s this poet and he looks very much like he could be in my family,” she remembers thinking. Like her father, Knight was a veteran and he was from nearby Mississippi. He conveyed several important lessons to the class, explaining to them that poetry requires practice. The most important lesson he taught young Duncan may have been that the art form was human and attainable.
“Up until that time, I’d never really thought about poets being living, real, breathing people,” Duncan says. “He showed me that I, as a Black child, could also grow up and write books. So it was in sixth grade that I declared to anyone who would listen that I was going to be a poet.”
In 2025, it’s clear that Duncan has made good on that promise, and then some. In 2005, Duncan wrote and published Honey Baby Sugar Child, a Black mother’s love song to her baby. That book is now 20 years old and is still in print. Duncan says Honey Baby Sugar Child is the proof of her longevity, but with more than 100,000 copies sold, Opal Lee and What It Means To Be Free is her biggest success. The author currently has 11 books in print, with another — The Dream Builders’ Blueprint: Dr. King’s Message to Children — due to hit shelves in 2026.
For all her successes, Duncan seems to prefer to discuss great figures in history. “I have gone on a journey to research and write about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to tell those stories that aren’t explored in textbooks,” she says. “In all of my years of researching King, I, like most of America, had never interrogated the life of Coretta Scott King to see who she really was.”
Duncan’s book, Coretta’s Journey, is dear to the writer’s heart. “She was a fighter. Dr. King did not make her; she was already a pacifist when she met him,” Duncan explains. She goes on to say that the activist and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin spoke about pacifism at Coretta’s high school. “From that moment on, she was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a freedom fighter.’”
As Duncan points out in the book, Coretta fought not only the evils of white supremacy and racism, but also patriarchy, within both the white and Black communities. It’s a struggle that continues today, and with any luck, Coretta’s story — as reported by Duncan — will inspire the activists and freedom fighters of tomorrow.
Duncan cannot yet know what ripples in the river of time she may have inspired. One commonality between Duncan’s dual careers as an educator and an author is that the true measure of her success is unclear until years later. Have the children she taught grown into kind, knowledgeable adults? Have the lessons in her books taken root in their hearts and minds?
All images courtesy Alice Faye Duncan.
