NPR People
Vertamae Grosvenor, NPR Biography
Correspondent, Culture, Arts Information Unit
Photo: Max Hirshfeld
Poet, actress, culinary anthropologist, and writer Vertamae Grosvenor is currently a correspondent on National Public Radio's Cultural Desk. She provides NPR's newsmagazines with stories that explore African American creativity, community, and citizenship. In addition, she is the host of NPR's Seasonings, a series of holiday specials about food and culture.
Grosvenor was the host of NPR's award-winning documentary series Horizons from 1988 until 1995, when the program was discontinued. Prior to becoming its host, she was a frequent contributor to the program, producing such memorable documentaries as 1983's "Slave Voices: Things Past Telling" and "Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon." "Daufuskie" earned her a Robert F. Kennedy Award and an Ohio State Award.
Among Grosvenor's other awards are a duPont-Columbia Award and an Ohio State Award, both in 1990, for "AIDS and Black America: Breaking the Silence," a series which aired on NPR's newsmagazines. In 1992, she was honored with a National Association of Black Journalists Award for an All Things Considered segment, "South Africa and the African-American Experience." Grosvenor also received a 1991 Communications Excellence to Black America (CEBA) Award for "Marcus Garvey: 20th Century Pan-Africanist."
Grosvenor was born and raised in the South Carolina low country, where the people and culture are interchangeably called "Geechee" and "Gullah." Her first language was Gullah, a combination of West African languages and English. Her autobiographical cookbook, "Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl," first printed in 1970, was reissued in 1986 and again in 1992. She is also the author of "Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap," published in 1972.
Grosvenor has been a contributing editor to Elan Magazine and Essence Magazine and has written for The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Washington Post, Life, Redbook, Ebony, and Viva. Her appearances on various TV programs have included The Phil Donahue Show, The Today Show, ABC's Nightline, BET's Our Voices, and The Galloping Gourmet. She had a featured role in Julie Dash's American Playhouse movie, Daughters of the Dust, for which she was also a language consultant. Drawing on her knowledge of the low country, Grosvenor was a consultant and writer for "Gullah," a television documentary for the National Geographic Explorer Series. In addition, she has narrated several other National Geographic programs. Grosvenor was awarded a local Emmy for her story, "Growing Up Gullah," which aired in Washington, D.C., on WUSA-TV's Capitol Edition.
Grosvenor has lectured and read her work at venues throughout the Americas. She was writer-in-residence for the Penn Center on St. Helena's Island, South Carolina, and has served on the Literary Task Force for the South Carolina Arts Commission.
Currently, Grosvenor is at work on a food folk opera entitled Nyam (Gullah for "to eat"), as well as a cookbook of the same name about Afro-Atlantic cookery. Another work-in-progress is a novel about black expatriates in Europe.
