For our next book, we chose “Madness: Race and Insanity In a Jim Crow Asylum” by Antonia Hylton.

We have exciting news to accompany this book… a guest speaker!!!

Joyce Philip, whose extensive biography follows below, began her career at the Crownsville Hospital.  Niels Holch and Joyce are colleagues on the Luminous Health Board.  When Niels mentioned we had a book group Joyce said she would be very happy to come give us some background and local perspective about the history of this hospital in our community.

We are so excited and grateful that she will be joining us on May 6th, and providing us with an insight that only someone so connected could provide. Please feel free to include anyone from FCF to join us. This is a great opportunity for all of the neighborhood book clubs to get together.

Joyce R. Phillip, former Chief Human Resources Officer, University of Maryland School of Medicine Faculty Physicians, Inc., and former Vice President of Human Resources, Anne Arundel Medical Center, brings more than twenty-five years human resources experience in the healthcare industry to her role as president of Dynamic Dimensions Unlimited, a coaching and consulting firm Joyce started in 2019.

She is active in her community as well in professional organizations.  Joyce  served previously as a member of the Board of Directors of Hospice of the Chesapeake (HOC) and continues to contribute as a member of HOC’s Governance Committee. Joyce is also active with the YWCA of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County where she has served in a variety of roles including president of the board, co-chair of the Safehouse Building Campaign, and is presently an active member of the Finance Committee. Recently, Joyce was appointed to the Luminis Health Board of Trustees.

Joyce earned her nursing degree from Freedmen’s Hospital School of Nursing and a bachelor’s degree in English from Bowie State University. She also holds a master’s degree in liberal arts from St. John’s College of Annapolis.

She and her husband of fifty-nine years, Dr. Errol Phillip, M.D., have lived in Crofton, Maryland for fifty-one years and have four children and seven grandchildren. Joyce enjoys spending her free time with her family, walking, singing, and traveling.

Joyce and Errol’s first healthcare careers in Maryland began at Crownsville State Hospital in 1967.  Joyce was nurse manager of the research unit and Errol was a psychiatric resident.  They both were extensively interviewed for the book, MADNESS: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. 

Amazon summary:  “In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.”