At 21, Kamara Dyer Simms ’19 is juggling plenty. Her English thesis proposal was approved last week. She’s temporarily leading the Black at Bryn Mawr program this semester. And she’s already had her published in gal-dem, a British magazine produced by women and non-binary people of color.
The piece, an interview with Madison McFerrin (a Brooklyn-based a cappella singer-songwriter), came out just last month. Kamara says being able to talk to McFerrin was a dream come true; she’d seen the singer perform at a Swarthmore concert last year and has been following her work ever since. Plus, as a Brit and a fellow singer (Kamara previously sang for The Extreme Keys, Bryn Mawr’s oldest a cappella group), Kamara brought a particularly unique perspective to the interview.
“I adore music!," says Kamara. "I always have. And I adore singing. I think about the relationship poems and lyrics have had to my growth—I’m very much invested in curating music, and in thinking about how it relates to my personhood.”
But Kamara is majoring in English, not music. When asked why, she laughs. “Every time I go home, people ask me, ‘Why did you go to America to study English? You’re English!’”
Part of the answer, she says, is the freedom that Bryn Mawr’s English department has offered her. “I really like the English department. It’s really very flexible—it allowed me to tailor the major to what I wanted, as opposed to restricting me to produce a specific thing, and that in turn allowed me to reconcile a lot of feelings I had about academia and my place within the academic space.”
At the same time, Kamara emphasizes, Bryn Mawr has not always been an easy home for her. She’s struggled to deal with the rigor and restriction of academia, and the racial issues that permeate both this campus and the world.
“I definitely hold the fact that I’m part of the lineage of black people at this College who have not only had to endure, but also survive,” she explains. “When I went through the Black at Bryn Mawr tour for the first time, it really resonated with me…when I think about Enid Cook '31 [the first black student to matriculate from Bryn Mawr], when I think about how everyone talks about being welcomed home here, I think about how that has looked for me.”
The Enid Cook '31 Center, she says, is her home on campus. It’s where she feels safe and supported, where she goes to seek solace and find community.
Kamara’s done her part to build that community on campus, as well. In the past, she’s been a part of dorm leadership as a Community Diversity Assistant, talked to prospective students as an 鶹AV tour guide, and led discussions on gender and sexuality as Spectra co-coordinator.
She’s currently the lead facilitator and coordinator for Dialogue on Race, a program that started in Baton Rouge by Maxine Crump as a way to encourage open and honest community dialogue to confront racism as an institutional and structural problem. The campus program, initially brought to Bryn Mawr by two alumnae, was offered during THRIVE (the required first-year wellness program) this semester; there, nearly 200 first-years participated in the conversation. Kamara says she thinks it “has the potential to open up a lot of conversations, especially because it doesn’t center emotions but tries to deconstruct racism as the institutional issue it is,” and she’s hoping to see it expanded to include faculty and administration training as well.
In terms of post-graduation plans, Kamara is also interested in museum and curatorial work, partially because she sees it as “a way of telling stories that doesn’t require someone to know the answer… well-curated exhibitions encourage people to question things, to question the way they think. I like that in museums, anyone can walk in and anyone can walk away with whatever.” She wants to innovate the sonic spaces of museum exhibitions, DJ in intentional community, and take jazz lessons.
“Music is very much my peace," Kamara says. "It’s allowed me to articulate and understand things that other things cannot, and it brings me the most joy out of anything, ever, in the whole world.”