
Gloria Jean Burgess
WebsiteYears: 2000, 2001, 2003
Biography
Poet, author, mother, daughter, sister, consultant, and executive coach; 33 years in a legacy marriage. Faculty: University of Washington, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center (Leadership Institute), and Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Three books of poetry, including The Open Door and Journey of the Rose. Best-selling non-fiction: Dare to Wear Your Soul on the Outside (Jossey-Bass/Wiley) and Legacy Living. Distinguished Scholar in Theater - Performance and Direction, University of Michigan. Other scholarship includes leadership, intercultural competence, and community building.
Poem
Sanctuary
for William Faulkner* and my father, Earnest McEwen, Jr.
Between the brush of angels’ wings
and furious hooves of hell, two mortal men
fell down. How you must have looked—
white shirt stained, khakis fatigued,
smelling of sweat and smoke,
hair at odds with itself and the world.
At the threshold among your restless dead
in echo and shadow of ancient oaks,
providing sanctuary, offering shade,
you had many worlds behind you,
few yet to be born: stories of insurgence,
scorn, decay—theme and variations
of a vanquished South.
Leaning against a jamb
of antebellum brass, you watched, waited,
raised weary arm and hand, saluted
the familiar stranger. Come. Enter. Sit. Sing.
You reached each other across the grate.
What you two must have known of heaven and hell.
* William Faulkner, Nobel Peace Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, was my father’s benefactor. Faulkner paid for my father to attend college at a time when he had few prospects of earning enough money to pay for it himself. This was Faulkner’s way of dismantling institutionalized racism long before desegregation was mandated in the South; it was my father’s way of freeing himself and his family from the strictures of apartheid.