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Current Work
Andrea is currently working on a new novel, Exploding in Slow Motion, for which she received the 2004 Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writer Grant.
In her speculative novel, Mindscape, an explosive future world is divided into warring Zones by a mysterious Barrier. Elleni, a spiritual outcast from a Nouveau Africain culture, takes up the mantel of her assassinated mentor and works to bring about world peace. Elleni gets support from an “ethnic throwback,” an action-adventure Entertainment star, and an old Shaman. This motley crew seems no match for the Barrier or the startling coalition of power-hungry politicians, ruthless gangsters, and fundamentalist spiritual leaders who prefer the balance of power that interzonal war affords.
As Elleni and crew struggle to be agents of change and set the world back on its course, they discover resources within themselves and allies in their world that they couldn’t have imagined.
Mindscape was excerpted in Dark Matter: Reading The Bones, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree R. Thomas and published by Warner Books in 2004.
Aqueduct Press: www.aqueductpress.com will publish Mindscape in February 2006. |
Short Bio
Andrea Hairston is a Professor of Theatre at Smith College and Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio & Television.
She has received many awards including a NEA Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship.
Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, and Hummingbird Flying Backward, have been science fiction plays. Archangels of Funk, a sci-fi theatre jam, garnered her a MCC Playwriting Fellowship for 2003.
Griots of the Galaxy, a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan and published by Arsenal Pulp Press.
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Artist Location
Florence, MA
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Art forms
Theater, Literary, Multidisciplinary
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Type of artist
Writer, Director, Performer, Arts Educator
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General Themes
Race/Ethnicity/Cultural Identity |
| Last updated on September 26th, 2005 |
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