Baby on Board
By Anzilla “Anzie” Gilmore
Licensed 2004

I attended Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU located 50 miles outside of Houston, Texas. HBCU’s have nurturing and support dyed in the wool. But what PVAMU’s School of Architecture (SOA) did not have was very many licensed architects on faculty, and not one black female architect to serve as a role model. So I graduated from PVAMU, bound for graduate school with the plan to follow in the footsteps of the most successful person I knew in architecture, the dean of our school, Dr. Ikhlas Sabouni. Dr. Sabouni or “Doc” as we called her then, was stylish, she held a Ph.D. in architecture and she was the boss. She had not taken the A.R.E. because she did not need to. In my eyes, neither did I. So I went to the University of Texas at Arlington and emerged a year and a half later with my master’s degree, the credential I needed to teach architecture. Continue reading →