A Brookhaven, MS, native, LaWanda Dickens is the Founder and Executive Director of the Magnolia Literacy Project. She has dedicated her 30-year career to teaching in higher education, researching, writing, and building programs that empower communities in multiple regions of the United States.

​

LaWanda is a faculty member in the Department of English and Modern Languages (EML) at Jackson State University (JSU), her alma mater. During her first year of teaching at JSU, the 2021-2022 academic year, she implemented programming to engage students in leadership roles at annual departmental conferences – Fall Creative Writers’ Series, EML Visual and Literary Arts Week, and the C.A.S.E. (Creative Arts and Scholarly Engagement) Festival. Since then, she has written grants and secured funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission for campus murals that raise students’ awareness of JSU’s history and culture through visual literacy.

​

For most of LaWanda’s career, she worked in Michigan, where she taught composition and rhetoric courses at Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit and Oakland University (OU) in Rochester. At WSU, she co-developed a service-learning initiative, positioning first-year writing students as mentors to sixth graders in Detroit Public Schools. At OU, she collaborated with the Center for Multicultural Initiatives and co-wrote the curriculum for writing courses offered in a summer bridge program designed to prepare incoming freshmen for success in college.

​

LaWanda’s background also includes service in broader sectors through partnerships with businesses, nonprofits, and other community stakeholders. While in Detroit, she helped implement a citywide summer jobs program, Grow Detroit's Young Talent (GDYT), that trains and employs young adults between the ages of 14 and 24. In Tallahassee, FL, she served in a similar fashion as Director of Project CREATE (Create Rewarding and Empowering Avenues through Employment) Inc. At GDYT and Project CREATE, LaWanda wrote grants, contracts, and established the necessary relationships to strengthen each agency’s impact.

​

Shortly after returning home to Mississippi in 2017, she began mentoring young people in her church and community in Brookhaven. She became instantly proud of the natural literary talents many of them displayed but was equally disappointed by the limited resources available to nurture their gifts. On that basis, she founded the Magnolia Literacy Project to empower young people -- not just in Brookhaven but across the state.