Barbara Summers (September 6, 1944 – November 2014) was an American writer and educator who had also had a long and successful career as a fashion model, working for 17 years with Ford Models, one of America’s top agencies. Her 1998 book, Skin Deep, the story of Black models in America and abroad, is a definitive work on black women in the modeling industry. She spent more a decade interviewing fashion professionals on three continents to record their experiences I went to the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the Sorbonne, where I promptly became a grad school dropout and a lifelong Francophile. In the surprising adventure that is my life, I have been a Ford fashion model, a world traveler, a teacher, a writer and editor, a lover, wife, and mother, a sister to several, a good friend to many. I define myself as an artist. Artists are charged with the special responsibility not just to speak truth but to sing it.”

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Barbara Summers

Barbara Summers (September 6, 1944 - November 2014) was an American writer and educator who had also had a long and successful career as a fashion model, working for 17 years with Ford Models, one of America's top agencies. Her 1998 book, Skin Deep, the story of Black models in America and abroad, is a definitive work on black women in the modeling industry. She spent more a decade interviewing fashion professionals on three continents to record their experiences I went to the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and the Sorbonne, where I promptly became a grad school dropout and a lifelong Francophile. In the surprising adventure that is my life, I have been a Ford fashion model, a world traveler, a teacher, a writer and editor, a lover, wife, and mother, a sister to several, a good friend to many. I define myself as an artist. Artists are charged with the special responsibility not just to speak truth but to sing it."