Piece De Way Home New and Selected Poems

Frenchy J. Hodges was born October 18, 1940 in the rural Georgia American town of Dublin, county of Laurens, in a community heavily populated by African Americans, the Buckeye Community. Love of the written and spoken word was begun early and influenced by a school-teacher mom who actively enjoyed vocabulary games and dramatic interpretation of popular poetry and rhymes throughout the poet's impressionable years. Hodges began writing poetry at the early age of 11 penning the lost but remembered story-poem: "Daddy Was Mean to Animals" describing a frustrated farmer-father's treatment of the occasional recalcitrant mule or milk cow. A first publication of Hodges' poetry was the Broadside Press publication of the chapbook Black Wisdom in 1970. Other limited-run self-publications include: Piece De Way Home, 1975; For My Guy, Love Poems, 1975; The Man of the House Is Not At Home, 1986; and Nightlines, 2006. In 2003, Hodges returned to the place of her beginning, Dublin, GA, after having retired from 25 hands-on years as a language arts teacher in Atlanta Public Schools. In 2008, she co-founded, with Yvonne Lamb-Castillo (also a returning Dublin native) Legacy Readers Theatre, which presents culture-bearing activities that tell our unique African American story through spoken word, indigenous music and song, and interpretive dance.