About the Presenters

Margaret (Peggy) Rozga

As a member of the 1967-68 Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council, Margaret (Peggy) Rozga participated in the successful campaign to secure passage of federal and local fair housing legislation. 

She later married civil rights leader Father James Groppi whom she first met when he drove a group of Milwaukee students to Alabama to work in a 1965 voter registration campaign organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. 

As a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Waukesha, she taught creative writing and multi-cultural literature courses.  She served for five years as the advisor to UW Waukesha Students for Peace.

As the convener of the March On Milwaukee Coordinating Committee, a group of community activists and university scholars, she led the planning of a series of events to commemorate the 40th anniversary of these fair housing marches.  These included a day-long community conference hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a commemorative celebration on the James E. Groppi Unity Bridge (formerly the 16th Street Viaduct).

Her play March On Milwaukee, presents in dramatic form the story of Milwaukee’s fair housing marches.  It has seen four full productions and three concert readings.  Her book about the fair housing campaign, Two Hundred Nights and One Day, was awarded a bronze medal in poetry in the 2009 Independent Publishers Book Awards and named an outstanding achievement in poetry for 2009 by the Wisconsin Library Association. 

She is also the author of a second book of poems, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, recently been released by Benu Press.  Her essay on poetry and politics appeared in the fall issue of Verse Wisconsin and has been nominated by the editors for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals including Nimrod and Stoneboat.

She currently offers poetry writing workshops and speaks on social justice throughout Wisconsin and nationally.  She lives in Milwaukee and blogs about poetry and social justice at http://benupress.com/For-Words/for_words.php.

A. Van Jordan

A. Van Jordan is a professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Van was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. Although much of his academic career has been spent in the South—he taught at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and, most recently, at the University of Texas at Austin—he began his academic training at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio, for his BA in English Literature. Coming back to the Midwest to join the English department at U-M seems like a natural transition for Van. He also holds an MA in Communications from Howard University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

His first book, Rise (2001), published by Tia Chucha Press and distributed by Northwestern University Press, tracks not only the history of African American music, but also the music of his life growing up in Ohio. His second book, M-A‑C-N-O-L-I-A (2004), published by W.W. Norton & Co, tells the story of MacNolia Cox, an Akron resident who was the first African American to reach the final round of the National Spelling Bee competition in 1936. Rise won the Josephine Miles PEN/Oakland award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A was awarded an Anisfield-Wolf Award and selected as one of the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times (TLS). Van has also been awarded a Whiting Award and a Pushcart Prize. Van is finishing up a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, and he recently published his third collection of poems, Quantum Lyrics (2007, W.W. Norton & Co.).

Rev. Bryan Massingale

Bryan N. Massingale received his doctorate in moral theology from the Academia Alphonsianum (Rome). He specializes in social ethics and teaches courses on Catholic Social Thought, African American religious ethics, liberation theologies, and racial justice. His approach to social ethics focuses upon the impact of religious faith as both an instrument of social injustice and a catalyst for social transformation.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Professor Massingale strives to be a scholar-activist through serving faith-based groups advancing justice in society.  He is a noted authority on issues of social and racial justice, having addressed numerous national Catholic conferences and lectured at colleges and universities across the nation.  He has served as a consultant to the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, providing theological assistance on issues such as criminal justice, capital punishment, environmental justice, and affirmative action. He has also been a consultant to the National Black Catholic Congress, Catholic Charities USA, the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Relief Services, the Leadership Conference of Religious Women, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men, the National Catholic AIDS Network, and the antiracism teams of Call to Action and Pax Christi USA.  He is an active participant in a network Catholic thought leaders striving for fuller inclusion of LGBT persons in society and the faith community.

Full Biography