Designing woman

Ann Lowe’s journey from Alabama to becoming a celebrated fashion designer

From the first page of By Her Own Design, author Piper Huguley transports readers to New York City, 1953. Designer Ann Lowe stands inside her shop, looking at the ruined wedding dress she’d artfully crafted for Jacqueline “Jackie” Bouvier. The night before, a pipe had burst directly above the gown Jackie was to wear when she married John F. Kennedy six days later. Raised in Jim Crow Alabama, the designer who rose above racial prejudice to build a career as a designer for the richest women in the social register was not going to give up.

Neither has Huguley, a professor of 19th-century literature at Clark Atlanta University, who has spent her career writing historical fiction about African American Christian women. Her Amazon bestsellers include the Home to Milford College series about the development of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and the Migrations of the Heart series, which follows the loves and lives of African American sisters during the 20th century’s internal Black migration in the U.S.

A political science major at UCLA, Huguley earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate in 20th-century U.S. literature from Georgia State University, with the goal of teaching. “I needed a job,” she says, noting that she needed to support herself in order to pen novels—a passion she’d been engaged in since middle school.

“When I was 12 … I stayed inside the entire summer and wrote my first story—a royal romance called The President’s Daughter and the King’s Wife,” Huguley tells the Connection from her home office in Atlanta. “It was the summer before the wedding of Charles and Diana, and my research racked up huge phone bills. Fortunately, I had two understanding and loving parents who encouraged my writing dreams.”

As a professor, Huguley is on a mission to encourage students at HBCUs to love literature and history. “When the time came to teach Uncle Tom’s Cabin, students needed historical background to better understand the text,” explains Huguley, who wondered whether reading about people like themselves—and what they were doing at a similar age—would increase their interest in reading for pleasure. “I knew they would benefit from role models, so I carved out my own space to do so.”

Next on Huguley’s agenda is a book about the secret friendship of Portia Marshall Washington Pittman and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She says, “People probably remember that Portia’s father, the esteemed educator Booker T. Washington, was the first Black man to come to dinner at the White House shortly after Alice’s father, Theodore Roosevelt, became president in 1901. Despite the uproar about that dinner, these two women became friends.” Once that book is published, Huguley will turn her attention to writing about other Black female artists.

“We must restore these untold stories back to history,” she insists. “Some people may feel that a novel is not the way to do it. … Some people like to fuss about biopics and by extension historical fiction, but books like these make us want to know more about history that has not been taught to us.”

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