Rev. Molly has announced that we will have another intern minister this coming year. Here is the text of her announcement:
I am delighted to share that we will be serving as a teaching congregation once more for the 2025-2026 program year! In September we will be welcoming Monica Clark-Robinson to UUCC to complete the second year of her two years of ministerial internship. She completed the first year at Church of the River UU in Memphis, TN.
This is something of a beautiful full-circle moment, as Monica was a member of our congregation from 1999-2001 while living in Columbia before graduate school. UUCC was, in fact, the first Unitarian Universalist congregation that Monica and her wife Greta joined as members! She remembers the warmth and creativity of our congregation fondly.
Monica currently lives in Little Rock, Arkansas (where she has been a long time UU lay leader), and will be with us for a part-time, hybrid-style internship: She will be in residence here in Columbia for an intensive 8 days each month, spanning two Sundays, and then will offer a limited amount of virtual ministry in the remaining weeks of the month. Monica will be with us on this schedule from September through May.
Please find Monica’s autobiographical introduction below… I can’t wait for you to meet her!
Monica Clark-Robinson is a seminarian in her final year at Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary and was also previously the Intern Minister at the Church of the River in Memphis. Before seminary, Monica received an MFA in Acting from Michigan State University and an MFA in Writing from Hamline University.
She’s the author of several children’s books, including “Let the Children March,” illustrated by Frank Morrison, “Standing On Her Shoulders,” illustrated by Laura Freeman, and the forthcoming “Teaching for Change: Septima Clark’s Legacy of Literacy and Liberation,” co-written with Yvonne Clark-Rhines, Septima Clark’s granddaughter. Monica’s books have won an International Literacy Association Debut award and a Coretta Scott King Honor award for illustration.
She has also worked with two different organizations teaching and mentoring incarcerated writers. Monica has spent time as an actor, theatre and English professor, unschooling mom, and vegan cook.
For fun and leisure, she loves to write poetry, read, cook, watch episodes of The Walking Dead, sing, act, work on her stand-up comedy set, and go thrifting. Monica lives in a yurt in the woods of Arkansas with her wife and daughter and is currently pursuing an honorary doctorate in Kitty Snuggles.