People at Teachers College often feel they’ve come home.
For Wayétu Moore, moving into Bancroft Hall from Monrovia, Liberia, at age 5, TC was a magical experience in a family saga of sacrifice and hope.
For Moore, now TC’s Margaret Mead Fellow in Anthropology & Education and the celebrated author of the novel She Would Be King (Graywolf Press 2018), that saga began in 1975 in Monrovia, where her mother’s middle-school teacher was Robert (Rocky) Schwarz (M.Ed. ’83, M.A. ’79).
Wayétu Moore (Photo Credit: Bruce Gilbert)
Mamawa Freeman-Moore came to TC on a Fulbright, but during Liberia’s civil war, rescued her family and brought them to TC. Schwarz, now TC’s Assistant Director of Business Services, remembers “the three girls watching The Princess Bride in my apartment.”
Founded in 1847 by the American Colonization Society, Liberia received thousands of American and Caribbean blacks who often clashed with indigenous Liberians. In She Would Be King, a village exile, an escaped Virginian slave and a Jamaican Maroon use their hidden powers to hold their new nation together.
Moore’s nonprofit, One Moore Book, publishes children’s literature in Liberia and other countries with underrepresented cultures, and her One Moore Bookstore in Monrovia is a teaching and reading center.
Moore also teaches at Randolph and John Jay Colleges. She’s writing a memoir and a second novel. “I want to make the most of this opportunity and use it to inspire people.”