- Honor Ford-Smith
Honor Maria Ford-Smith (b. 1951,
Montreal ,Canada ) is aJamaica nactress , playwright, scholar, andpoet . The daughter of a brown Jamaican mother and an English father, Ford-Smith is sometimes described as "Jamaica white," signalling a person of mixed race who appears white.Ford-Smith, who studied theatre at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison , was a co-founder and artistic director of Sistren, a theatre collective of working-class Jamaican women established in 1977. Sistren created its own plays collaboratively, and performed in Jamaica and abroad; the group also worked extensively incommunity theatre andpopular education , particularly around issues affecting women. Ford-Smith was also a member of the Groundwork Theatre Company, created in 1980 as the repertory arm of the Jamaica School of Drama; it became an autonomous company in 1987.She edited and contributed to Sistren's book "Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women", published in 1986 and re-issued, with a new afterword by Ford-Smith, in 2005. Her collection of poems, "My Mother's Last Dance", appeared in 1996. Among her many theatre projects have been a dramatic adaptation of "My Mother's Last Dance", and "Just Jazz", an adaptation of
Jean Rhys 's "Let Them Call It Jazz".Ford-Smith moved to
Toronto , Canada in 1991, receiving her doctorate in education from theUniversity of Toronto in 2004. She continues to write, to work in theatre and to teach in Toronto.She currently teaches at York University in Toronto under the Faculty of Environmental Studies.
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