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Ruth J. Simmons was the 12th child of Texas sharecroppers. Her first home had no running water, electricity, or books. Despite these challenges鈥攐r perhaps because of them鈥攕he eventually became the first Black president of an Ivy League university.

Up Home book cover

Up Home is both an origin story set in the segregated South and a paean to the people鈥攎ostly siblings and teachers鈥攚ho helped raise young Ruth Simmons after the death of her beloved mother. The New York Times Book Review praised its formal, if slightly old-fashioned style, naming it an editor鈥檚 choice.

Ruth Simmons

Dr. Simmons is the former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas鈥檚 oldest HBCU, and the former vice provost of Princeton University. She earned her bachelor鈥檚 degree from Dillard University and her master鈥檚 and doctorate from Harvard. The president of France named her chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and President Biden named her to the White House HBCU Advisory Board.

Because Up Home is a clear-eyed account of one girl鈥檚 hunger for an education, which she sees as her ticket out of poverty, patriarchy, and racism. It belongs on the bookshelf alongside The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway who was, like Dr. Simmons, a president of Smith College.

"I saw speech as a way of standing up straight and declaring myself as someone who mattered," says Ruth Simmons in .

Ruth J. Simmons at Colgate

Join us in person or  on Thursday, Oct. 17, for Ruth J. Simmons鈥 reading and book-signing. All Living Writers events take place at 4:30 EST in Persson Auditorium. Refreshments available.

Beyond the Book

  • 鈥淲hen achievement catapults you far from where you were raised, keeping a foot in both worlds can require an instruction manual,鈥 writes Stacia L. Brown, in her  of Up Home. 
  • In a review of new memoirs by Drew Gilpin Faust and Ruth J. Simmons, the notes Dr. Simmons鈥 鈥渞estrained tone as she describes a childhood that could have taken place in the 1850s.鈥 
  • 鈥淎lthough she was uneducated and unpretentious in every way, [my mother] shaped my self-identity, my drive to self-improvement and, ultimately, the values that motivate me to do my work as an educator,鈥 Dr. Simmons told interviewer A. Delphine Delmore for .
  • In this excerpt from the , 鈥淔inding Your Roots,鈥 Dr. Simmons talks about what it was like to grow up in Texas, under the shadow of Jim Crow. 

鈥淚 was born to be someone else. Someone, that is, whose life is defined principally by race, segregation, and poverty.鈥

Ruth J. Simmons, Up Home