The Harlem Renaissance was enriched by the work of such poets as Lucy Ariel Williams Holloway. Lucy Ariel Williams, who was called “Ariel” by friends and family, was born in Mobile, Alabama, on March 3, 1905. Williams attended the Emerson Institute in Mobile until her sophomore year of high school, then completed her secondary education at Talladega College in 1923. She received a bachelor of music degree from Fisk University in Nashville in 1926. While a senior at Fisk, she received fleeting national attention when she published the dialect poem “Northboun” in the “Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life”, (the journal of the National Urban League) magazine’s 1926 contest.
The poem was later published in anthologies edited by Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and Arna Bontemps, James Weldon Johnson and others, including Golden Slippers. “Northboun’,” a short poem in dialect about the Great Migration, has been called her “signature poem” and “one of the best poems of the period. Its haunting refrain underlines one of the major continuing divides in American culture. “Northboun’” won an important prize in the Opportunity. Two years later, Williams earned an MM from Oberlin Conservatory, with a major in piano and a minor in voice (1928). During the summers, Williams continued her musical studies with bandleader Fred Waring and at Columbia University.
With the initial stewardship of Jessie Redmon Fauset, Williams also began publishing in the Crisis (the official publication of NAACP) in late 1926. Williams released only one volume of poetry during her lifetime, “Shape Them Into Dreams”. During the Harlem Renaissance, Holloway contributed to numerous periodicals and anthologies: The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1970 (Doubleday, 1970) and The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (Doubleday, 1949), both edited by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. Despite all of her professional training, Holloway was unable to find work as a concert pianist, and eventually decided to pursue a career teaching music.
She began her teaching career as director of music at North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (1926–32). She held multiple positions as a teacher including director of music, and was the first to hold the position of supervisor of music within the public-school district of Mobile, AL. It was during her teaching career that Holloway began to write professionally. Between 1926 and 1935, Williams published five poems in which appeared in “Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life” and in the Crisis. In 1936 she married Joaquin M. Holloway. She preferred not to use her first name and was known professionally first as Ariel Williams and later as Ariel Williams Holloway.