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Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1928, Eugenia Williams Collier grew up as the United States endured the Great Depression and participated in World War II. Her father was a doctor and her mother was an educator, and they ensured that their daughter and son had access to excellent education. After earning degrees at Howard University (BA, 1948), Columbia University (MA, 1950), and the University of Maryland (PhD, 1976), Collier eventually followed in her mother’s footsteps as a professor and academic. First, however, she spent five years as a caseworker for Baltimore’s Department of Public Welfare. Although she did not experience the needs and stresses that accompany financial insecurity herself, Collier was well aware of the tight connections between educational opportunity and economic security.
As a professor, Collier coauthored books and led workshops to help students find their voices through more confident writing. Her own dissertation studied how Black writers developed styles and voices to create a distinct aesthetic, or artistic and theoretical framework, that captures and conveys the experiences of Black Americans. During her academic career, she collaborated with Richard Long to collect and edit Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1990), bringing together an accessible collection of works by authors dating back to colonial days and almost to the close of the 20th century. The works are arranged chronologically to chart ideas, perspectives, history, and art from the nation’s earliest days, when most Black people were enslaved, through centuries of movement toward liberation and greater equality.
Collier contributed her own works to the growing field of African American studies, a field in which she worked as a scholar, as an author of short stories and two novels. “Marigolds” is one of her earlier works and won the first Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction. She earned other awards and honors for her work as a writer and as an educator before retiring from the classroom in 1996.
