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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—or perhaps because of them—she 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—mostly siblings and teachers—who 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’s choice.

Ruth Simmons

Dr. Simmons is the former president of Smith College, Brown University, and Prairie View A&M, Texas’s oldest HBCU, and the former vice provost of Princeton University. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Dillard University and her master’s 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’s 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 this three-question interview for Living Writers.

Ruth J. Simmons at Colgate

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

Beyond the Book

  • “When achievement catapults you far from where you were raised, keeping a foot in both worlds can require an instruction manual,” writes Stacia L. Brown, in her Washington Post review of Up Home. 
  • In a review of new memoirs by Drew Gilpin Faust and Ruth J. Simmons, the New York Times notes Dr. Simmons’ “restrained tone as she describes a childhood that could have taken place in the 1850s.” 
  • “Although 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,” Dr. Simmons told interviewer A. Delphine Delmore for Southern Review of Books.
  • In this excerpt from the PBS show, “Finding Your Roots,” Dr. Simmons talks about what it was like to grow up in Texas, under the shadow of Jim Crow. 

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

Ruth J. Simmons, Up Home