Slavery
Art of enslavement and escape.
Summoning the spirits.
The playwright discusses his formative years, rejuvenation of historical material, and how race is coded into theatergoing itself.
Congratulations to Ward on winning the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Reminding us of what should never have been forgotten
”In a way, I am like some demented lawyer seeking only to get a hung jury—with the saving grace being that, when the truth is not obvious, people tend to do their most profound and significant thinking.”
“I would like to do more of that kind of thing: travel, spend some time in a place and really work from a different vantage point. I don’t know what will happen in my work from that, but I trust my ability to find the tools to find my way into my work. I think I will sit out in the woods more.”
In the slave yard, it sets a standard. Desperate folks demonstrating who is hardier, or more foolish.
Keith Mayerson on how Randy Wray’s paintings and sculptures channel a Southern gothic sensibility through a 21st-century surrealist technique. Mayerson is currently showing work at Derek Eller Gallery.
Novelist and poet Evelyne Trouillot comes from a prominent Port-au-Prince family of writers and intellectuals. Novelist Edwidge Danticat queried the writer on Haiti’s past and its future.
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
Reading Dr. Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (New Beacon Books, 1988) is a transformative experience that unchains both truths and memories and moves you to explore what she calls the “half that’s not been told.”
“Jefferson and Monticello are mythic. A lot of the work that I’ve done is related to this search for origins, and Jefferson represents the origin of an American self-image.”
In the early 1930s, shortly after the invention of the portable audio recorder, the Federal Writers’ Project documented the experience of slavery by interviewing those who had lived under it.
Ellen Douglas’s Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell contains scattered tales and facts gathered from her relatives, and the residents and archives of the author’s community.
Amistad, an opera commissioned by Philadelphia and Chicago, is not merely a musical remake of the film but a complex and conundrum-filled version of a tragic event.
This First Proof contains the poems “Raindrop Women,” and “Lineage.”
