Florence Ladd is a fiction writer, social critic, and psychologist. She earned a B.S. in psychology from Howard University and her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Rochester. Her novel, Sarah's Psalm, received the 1997 Literary Award for Fiction from the American Library Association's Black Caucus. Her short stories have appeared in both The Golden Horn and Ragtime and she has also written several nonfiction and research works.
Ladd taught at Simmons College in Boston, a college in Istanbul, Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and Graduate School of Design, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she became associate dean in the school of architecture. She went on to work as dean of students at Wellesley College, a research consultant with the Institute of International Education's South African Education Program, and a liaison to the United Nations at Oxfam America. In 1989, she returned to academia at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, a unique multi-disciplinary center of advanced studies for women.
Ladd has also served as overseer of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as a member of the Board of Trustees of Hampshire College, and on the board of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Today she holds residences in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Flavigny-sur-Ozerain in Burgundy, France.
