Personal Statement: I am a playwright striving to infuse others with my love of history, particularly African-American histories of successful families and the love that underpins real accomplishment. These are my linear plays. I also write plays that examine the modern world’s intersections with its past to unearth the whys of institutionalized and institutionalizing human behavior.

I was born in Chicago at the close of World War II to parents whose library on Africa and its Diaspora was where I learned to read. And now I am a teaching artist to a generation who think the “Old Days” were the 1980s, and the 1960s were before time itself.

They’re probably right. But I thoroughly enjoy facilitating youthful discovery of their own creative process, opening them to the possibility that they could be playwrights and coaxing them to use their own imaginations to form worlds not found on television or inside playstations.