Literature

Literature as respite, as resistance, as a reimagining

Poetry

“I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.” -Ntozake Shange

Molefi Kete Asante, 400 Years of Witnessing (2019)

Amiri Baraka, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"

Reginald Dwayne Betts, "When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving"

Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till"

Lucille Clifton, "4/30/92 for rodney king"

Rita Dove, "Teach Us to Number Our Days"

Eve Ewing, 1919

Ross Gay, "A Small, Needful Fact"

Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again"

June Jordan, "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies"

Audre Lorde, "A Litany for Survival"

Nate Marshall, "the valley of its making"

Claude McKay, "America"

Harryette Mullen, "Elliptical"

Claudia Rankine, "You are in the dark, in a car"

Clint Smith, Your National Anthem

Fiction

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way” - Alice Walker

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2014)

Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle (2001)

Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half (2020)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912/1924)

Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)

Tayari Jones, An American Marriage (2019)

Melanie Hatter, Malawi's Sisters (2019)

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)

Ann Petry, The Street (1946)

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999)

Jaqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone (2019)

Drama

Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.” Suzan-Lori Parks

Visit "Staging Black Protest: A Play List" by Lisa B. Thompson

Anna Deveare Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994)

Lydia Diamond, Stick Fly (2008)

Katori Hall, The Mountaintop (2011)

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964)

Lynn Nottage, Sweat (2015)

Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play (1993)

Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enough (1976)

August Wilson, Fences (1985)

Appreciate

Credits:

Created with images by Suad Kamardeen - "Exploring what it means to “let loose” and simply create." • Suad Kamardeen - "Exploring what it means to “let loose” and simply create." • Kyle Head - "My brother recently landed a feature role in an amateur theatre production of “Singing In The Rain”. Despite what the title infers - there is nothing amateur about it. Production value is high, and the acting takes you out of the auditorium and into your own magical sing-song world. Needless to say - a very proud brother right here."