Is there anything she can’t do?

Interview by Colin W. Sargent

Victoria Rowell—the actress, writer, director, producer, activist, and mother—was born in Mercy Hospital in Portland in 1959. Her birth mother was a Mayflower descendant. The Sisters of Mercy directed little Vicki to a foster home, but two and a half years after she bonded with her foster parents, “Maine stepped in,” Rowell says. “They said, ‘She’s black—you can’t keep her.’ The State of Maine took me away from the Taylors because Maine was one of 16 states [at that time] where it was against the law for white parents to raise a black foster child.” This tragedy sizzles through Rowell’s New York Times bestselling book The Women Who Raised Me. Her further adventures, from her rise to ballet prodigy, movie and television actress, bestselling author, and auteur, bring her to us now.

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