Melissa P. Kemp
Melissa Prunty Kemp is a former college lecturer from 1986 - 2012 and an archivist since 2015. In her teaching career at large state institutions, like Virginia Tech and Kent State Universities, and in small colleges, like Morris Brown College and Bauder College, she taught African American literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement; Contemporary, Latin-American, and Native American literature; Organizational and Business Communications; and Creative Writing. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Hollins University - Roanoke, a Master of Arts degree in English from Virginia Tech - Blacksburg (where she was the second Black student to earn a graduate degree from that department and where she studied with Nikki Giovanni), and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte, NC.
As a Chair of General Education (2003 - 2008) and an archivist in her own company–KPW-AMC that she started in 1989 in her hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Melissa managed and maintained various sets of records, local histories, school histories, and, from 2013 - 2015, the records of the nation’s oldest African American international fraternity for whom she also functioned as an assistant webmaster in charge of database management and website content maintenance. She was a curator of African American art and history and a Director of Development in two museums - the Harrison Museum of African American Culture in Roanoke and the Hammonds House Galleries in Atlanta, Georgia. Her love of history and archives led her to formalize her study of the subject: in Spring 2023, she completed a Masters in Archives and Records Administration at San Jose State University. Her areas of study and research interest were digital archiving and exhibitions, oral history, using artificial intelligence to conduct digital archives tasks, and increasing access to archives in underserved populations.
Melissa has also conducted and edited several oral histories, including “A Hidden History: The Black Experience in the Roanoke Valley” with Harrison Museum and Virginia Tech; Batteaux boats on the James River for the Harrison Museum and Virginia’s Explore park; “The Nurse’s Station: A History of Nurses at Burrell Memorial Hospital” for Harrison Museum; and 18 oral history interviews with Swarthmore College students of the 1960 - 1966 Civil Rights Movement, 2022.
Her motivation for service in archives stems from a background of working with predominantly Black and other ethnic populations that gives her first-hand knowledge of how instructive and supportive of learning is the appearance of teaching materials and subject matter that represent the communities and experiences of those being taught. Melissa wants to advance and secure the longevity of African American history, literature, and culture in the nation’s high education repositories as well as within the communities who generate the history that archives are created to steward. Melissa wants to ensure that reparative archival practice is applied to Black subject matter and special collections to restore hidden history to the public square of history. She is especially interested in helping Black and other ethnic populations conduct community archiving and preservation that can become integrated in their local education systems. She believes digital transformation of as many archives from these communities as possible is an appropriate, reparative way for traditional archives and universities to support Black and other ethnic communities.