Zakiyyah Modeste, special projects director, company member; Linda Parris-Bailey, artistic director; and Nancy Brennan-Strange, storyteller

By Nayo Watkins

Linda Parris-Bailey: Zakiyyah’s our newest staff member. She came on board three months ago? Two months ago?

Zakiyyah Modeste: September.

LPB: She is our TRY Project director. TRY is our youth project. We’ve had a youth project for 12 years or more, and in the past three years, we’ve got some funding through the Juvenile Justice Program at the state to do a focus on juvenile justice. For the past three years, we’ve been doing some work around those issues. Margaret, actually the first director was Carolyn Jives, who was really good – and then Margaret [Miller] came back and she was the next director, and Zakiyyah turns out to be the third director of the TRY program. She hasn’t been here for that long. The other thing about Zakiyyah is our relationship began when Zakiyyah offered to do a fundraiser for Carpetbag, to use her skills in promotion in the area of positive hip-hop. She approached us and said, "Let me do something for you." We knew each other before then, but that was the first time we ever did anything together.

Nayo Watkins: Your title?

ZM: Special Projects Director, as TRY Project Director.

LPB: Zakiyyah is focused on the youth program, but she’s filling in everywhere else, too. Now, this is Nancy Brennan-Strange. Nancy and I have been working together on and off for years. Nancy is a storyteller and workshop leader. Nancy has been working specifically with the ALTA Project. ALTA stands for Adult Literacy Through the Arts. How Nancy and I first started working together was through Wolf Trap, which was a pilot program with preschoolers that we did with the Wolf Trap Center in Washington. I did that for about eight years and Nancy and I got to know each other as storytellers and musicians. We talked about the fact that we were doing work with the preschoolers around using your art as an educational tool. Melanie Reeves, who was the director of the Jubilee Community Arts Center, and I got together and said, "Wouldn’t this be wonderful to just try a project where we were going into adult-ed. classrooms and using drama-based techniques to try to get people to tell their stories, think about how they learn, figure out ways that they can use their own creative impulses to facilitate their own learning?" That’s the foundation of the ALTA Program. Nancy has been working with that program since it began as one of the artists in the program. That’s why I asked Nancy to join us. And we’ve been doing that, what for about eight years? Seven years?

Nancy Brennan-Strange: It’s been at least eight. Yeah.

LPB: That’s who we have here. In a way, Zakiyyah has the newest experience with Carpetbag. And Nancy has the experience of being the person who works with a particular program, but not with the ensemble. She’s also been doing research on this new piece I’m working on. It’s been really effective.

NW: It’s kind of interesting that you worked with young people who are not performers. so you are getting them used to –

ZM: – the stage. They are all teenagers. We have one who is 18. He’s a college student. He’s the oldest one. And our youngest one is 14. She’s a freshman in high school. So, we have a cool combination of kids. Interesting.

NW: What are they working on now?

ZM: They are working on the performance for "Voices," which is going to be a shortened, less-than-30-minute performance that we are exchanging with the kids from Appalshop. The AMI kids. That’s going to take place on Tuesday at Moses Teen Center. So, we’ve been rehearsing intensively these last three weeks. I can give it to them. We sat down to see if they had enough time to learn, the rehearsals – how long they should be with the plan. There were all these things we had to deal with, people not coming, things we had to hurry up and work through.

LPB: The other part of that is a piece that was built this summer, but each group puts its own mark on it. They’ve created a whole new way of presenting the piece and putting it together.

NW: Starting with the purpose, and your understanding"

ZM: With our TRY? Well, I know with Linda everything is based around an issue that you are trying to change. So. with this piece we are focusing on juvenile delinquency, based around juvenile justice, ’cause that’s where we got our grant from. With everything they do there’s usually a hidden message or purpose to socially change things or to correct things. This one piece deals with alcoholism and the effects. After we perform, there is going to be a discussion.

NBS: Are these teenagers? Is AMI teenagers from up in Kentucky?

LPB: AMI is Appalshop Media Institute. It is actually CMI, Community Media Initiative at Appalshop. So, it’s a project. The focus in the discussion tomorrow, bringing the two groups together, is how the teenagers’ artistic work addresses social issues in the community.

NW: Do the kids get the purpose? Why they are involved?

LPB: I’ll answer that from one perspective. I think sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t. I think sometimes the young people are there because they want to act, and that is really their purpose in being there. We always offer it as a job opportunity so that people who don’t have resources – it’s not like you come and volunteer, or you pay us to do it. We actually approach it as their employment so they get this idea that they are working artists that do this work. And that their voices are important. All of those things we try to teach about the cultural work. So, we found out this summer that, of course, some kids do it for the money. And it was interesting because this summer was a little bit different from our usual summers. You know straight up some of the kids said, "I do it ’cause this is a job." About half of them are returning that have been in the project before, so they’ve had some mediation training. They’ve had some discussion about what the issues are, about what juvenile justice is, about what it means. And then some of them are brand new, have no real clue about that.

NW: What’s the total number?

LPB: Eight right now. We max. at ten, but there are eight of them right now. That’s about right, four of them have been through some of the components. And four of them are really brand-spanking new. So, that’s my perspective but you [Zakiyyah] spend more time with them.

ZM: I think it’s kind of hard at this point to answer that question because we kind of, I don’t want to say rushed but, kind of went hard through the audition process, rehearsals – just for this performance. I mean, we talked about how everything was focused around juvenile delinquency. After this performance I really want to sit down and talk with them about what kind of issues they face, or are important to them, so that they can have some kind of passion or connection to it. Right now they are just doing something that was just "here." So, if they could sit down and create, and think about issues that are really effect them, it’d be straight.

NW: The material that you are using, how was that originally created?

LPB: What we do, and have done with all the youth pieces, is we have a period of development. We use theater activities and we talk about the kinds of issues that they are facing as students, as teenagers, you know – what’s going on with them. Out of that we kind of draw – and this was true long before the juvenile-justice piece ever fell into place – we then kind of look at an emerging thematic and begin to shape some piece around one of their stories that seems to kind of tie that thematic in. Then we begin to do some improvisations around that thematic, and then one of us begins to pull together the beginnings of a script. So, the participants are not writing the actual script, but we are taking what we are gathering from the improvisations, from what they say, from all of those things and beginning to put them together into a script. I’ve done probably, I think four of them. Margaret did last summer’s. They are all pretty much directly from what the young people are saying in the context of the work. Adora [Dupree] worked with them last year and did a lot of development around, again, their concern to how those are addressed. And then we try to bring in some resource people as issues come up. The kinds of people we’ve had, like I said, Adora came in and done some training, Don Ducker from the Mediation Center has come in and done some mediation training.

NW: So training is artistic and it’s other kinds?

LPB: Right. We’re getting ready to take them into a street law program that originated in Washington. We’ve been working a lot with Fran Ensly. One of the projects that they did last year was to work with a group of law students, and the law students essentially did the same kind of thing. They kind of talked with them about what their issues were. Talked with them about how the law approaches those issues. Talked with them about how they can impact laws around those issues.

NW: And Fran is … ?

LPB: Fran Ensly is a professor is of law at the university. She teaches a class called Community Law. She works a lot in the community. So, after we did the project last year and I got some material, we did the Culture and Community Law Project last year. Fran introduced us to the street law program that came out of Howard University in Washington. That program is mandatory for juvenile offenders in Washington. Offenders who have been engaged in crimes that involve weapons are mandated to go through the street law program. The street law program, for me, had some of the best questions and issues around juvenile justice that I have seen anywhere. You know, this whole idea of a juvenile-justice system was very confusing to me. How young people can navigate their way through that whole thing. It wasn’t until I got the street law information at the program that a lot of things became clear to me.

NW: The questions are not only about negotiating, but are the questions about questioning the system itself?

LPB: Yes. I think so. In terms of the kind of training they got. In terms of impacting legislation and challenging what exists. I think that needs to be a stronger part, if we are going to continue with juvenile justice. The program was much stronger than that when we began. It’s been the focus for the last two years. We are going into the third year. But it’s still about where the young people find these issues in their community. We just tie it in with how that impacts their understanding and their thoughts about justice issues.

NW: You said something about the young people helping to shape how it’s going to be presented.

ZM: With the last script, we were confronted with a 30-minute time limit and we needed to find a way to cut it down. We sat together and I told them the problem. Some of them knew the script and some of them didn’t. Actually we did a theater exercise and I asked them to exchange papers – a story line, a conflict and something that has happened to them – and exchanged, then played it out. One group decided to do an alcoholism phase: The daughter gets home from school, she’s not supposed to be home from school. The mother is upset. She’s an alcoholic. Her grades are bad, actually the girl was caught drinking in school. The guy brings her home. They get into it. The daughter is suggested to tutoring or something like that. We actually used that to open up our performance, and incorporate that into our script.

NW: How did they make the decision?

ZM: They just sat down and came up with the idea themselves. I just gave them an outline of what I wanted them to tell me about and they came up with the idea, that opening scene idea, themselves.

NW: Zakiyyah, something we haven’t covered is what was your background before coming to Carpetbag?

ZM: Oh I’ve got a crazy background. I guess. I’ve been into dance and theater when I was younger, I say growing up until I was like 12 or 13, dance and theater all the time and gymnastics.

NW: In New York?

ZM: Yeah. In New York. When I turned 14, I started running track, which took a chunk of my life. I did nothing but track until I got to college. I was on a scholarship at UT and I hurt my knee. I was actually going to be a theater major, but I hurt my knee and I found that theater was a way to express myself. It took some of my energy that I was reluctant to have with my injury. I had all this energy and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t like walk around without any pain. So, I started back with the theater just to let some energy that I had held up inside me out. And then as my knee got better I started back with dance. Then I met this woman – I was ushering one day and she’s like, "Carpetbag Theatre –you should –Carpetbag Theatre, Carpetbag Theatre –" and I had this card in my room for I would say about seven months before I even called Linda. The card kept getting in the way, and I was like, let me call her. That’s how we met. Finally. And I guess I was interested in the company and becoming a member when I approached her, but then I was like, "Well, there are other things I could do to be involved." So, I just explored different avenues in my head. After track I just had this void. Even though I was still in school, I just had this void that I needed to fill up. So, I graduated this past May.

NW: To the extent that you understand, and I realize that you haven’t been there that long, but to the extent that you understand Carpetbag’s mission how does this work with the young people play into that?

ZM: Our next step is to attack things that are issues to them right now. With me, I know that I have an issue with sexual activity in young girls. That’s a big problem right now because we’ve got 14-year-olds, 13-, 14-year-olds, and they’re not even in charge of their lives, but the one thing they are in charge of they end up abusing. I know that’s a big issue that I want to attack – well, I don’t want to attack. I don’t know how it is going to be received with them. I want them to kind of come up with it themselves.

NW: I want to talk about partnerships some. That certainly would include the kind of work that you’ve done with Carpetbag and your relationship – could you talk about that a little bit?

NBS: The ALTA program I guess – the adult literacy program –Linda and Melodie Reeves came up with the idea to work with adult learners. When it first started it was Linda Upton, and me and Darren Douglas, a mixture of musicians and actors. We started at the Knoxville Board of Education with their Adult Learning Program. It was kind of a learning program to get that off the ground, because we had never done anything like that before. We had all worked in a program called Wolftrap Early Learning Through the Arts, so we all stared with that same idea where you incorporate the arts into what they were learning at school. We learned a lot the hard way, like trying to get them to act. We do warm-ups with Wolftrap where you get the kids up jumping around. We started trying to get those grown-ups up jumping around. Sometimes that was good. Sometimes it wasn’t. It was almost like a learning process for everybody, for them and for us too. I’ve learned a whole lot from that since the beginning. We had a weeklong workshop this summer.

NW: Was Wolftrap local?

LPB: No it was a project. It started out in Washington and Baltimore and they selected seven sites around the country and trained artists that had drama and music backgrounds.

NBS: It started as a kind of grassroots program,

LPB: It was a rural program. It didn’t even serve the cities at all. It started out as a rural program in the surrounding counties.

NBS: And it worked real well to be out in the surrounding counties because in the city the HeadStart program here is real, real political and has got a lot of problems. Out in the rural areas it’s really a pretty good program. Real family kind of feeling and the teachers stay for a long time.–

LPB: A lot of community interaction with the children and the families.

NBS: Yeah. And they really care about families. I’ve worked in this city a couple of times, and it’s not the same.

NW: What interests you as a storyteller?

NBS: I’m primarily a musician. I tell stories, but I am as interested or more interested in collecting stories as telling them myself. I’m real interested in stories of people’s lives. One of the great attractions to the ALTA program is that we really did do a lot of that kind of thinking back to your childhood and special places and special times – and all of these stories would come out of that. It’s really great. Just what I’ve seen happen from the beginning to that workshop we did this summer, we had people acting – including me! – acting out something that happened to us in our childhood. Somebody that was a favorite person. We would think about that and then have a little vignette that would come out of that – all the different participants in the workshop. The facilitators and the people from the learning center acted it all out together. It was a real emotional experience for me. I was just going into it thinking I was going to be a facilitator. It just really did something to me. Everybody was keeping a journal and drawing a picture of yourself. It was pretty awesome. Plus, we got a whole week to all really be together, doing this stuff together. It really formed a community of people that cared about each other a lot.

NW: As an individual artist, when you consider where you are going to collaborate, or where you’re going to be a partner in something, what are the things that are important about whether you are going to be involved or not? What are the things that make you feel you really want to be a part of that?

NBS: One thing is the people that we are dealing with, the population. Like if it’s kids – I really like working with Head Start kids. Learning centers – I had never worked with a group like that before, but I found it to be real. It was all different ages. And what really attracted me was that we had a good team going in to it. Everybody communicated a lot. We had meetings to find out what we were going to do. I mean it was a good learning process just setting the program up, and then follow through.

NW: What’s important to you about that team? What makes you know that you can or can not work with that team?

NBS: I’ve worked with teams before where people didn’t communicate with each other, didn’t let each other know what was going on. On this team, like for the ALTA program everybody communicated very directly. We identified what the needs are, what we are going to do.. Plus, when we started planning sessions, the facilitators were artists and we also had people from the Learning Center as part of the team. So, it wasn’t just us with our opinions about it. It was people that knew maybe what would work and what wouldn’t work, what they needed, too.

NW: Is the ALTA project theater?

LPB: Oh yeah. It is. I think it’s theater. It’s theater on a couple different levels. It’s based on that whole deal that you are not just doing something that’s going towards a performance, you are engaged in the creative process, and engaging people in the creative process so that they begin to explore. Particularly in terms of ALTA, how do I learn something? How do I use my own creativity to help me do that? These are adults who have incredibly difficult life stories. Incredibly difficult life stories. That’s a whole learning process again. But they are also people whose only educational experience was failure. Our idea is that the educational experience should feel like success. It should be success. It engages you and keeps you moving towards whatever that goal is that you have. If you simply go back into a system that repeatedly makes you fail, then how are you going to find the will in the morning to get up and go do that?

The interesting transition that happened during this time was that when we first started with the adult learning program in Knox County, it was all voluntary. So, all of these people had made choices to go back to school. They had some kind of motivational base that they started with, and it was – across the board, you know –economics. And some of them were laid-off workers that were back. And some of them were people in the community that had decided that they just wanted to get their G.E.D. or they just wanted to learn to read. But then in the midst of this, the whole system changed because of the Welfare Reform Act. So, in the middle of our ALTA program, we were afforded the opportunity to really work with the population that we wanted to work with, which was a grassroots population, and the system was in complete chaos because they didn’t know how to educate people who have been failing at education and they were scared to death. The students were forced to go into classrooms, these teachers who had been teaching maybe five or six people at a time were now faced with 20 adults who didn’t want to be there. It forced us into a position where we were getting it to the people who wanted it, but we had to look at how we operated our program in order to facilitate learning for people who had that failing experience. So, that’s what we started focusing on. And that’s where the Institute came from.

And you know, we tried to do our homework. Margaret and I went to training for advocates for people who were involved in Welfare Reform. So, we began to try and understand what was happening in the process. We also were approaching from the other direction because the Center for Literacy Studies did a lot of work trying to design a program that was appropriate for the Welfare Reform program, and you know what I’m talking about. They were throwing people out. The whole point of that was to get people out. So, the teachers went through an incredible learning experience. A lot of teachers in the adult ed program, first of all they don’t have to be certified. They are people from the community who have retired. Some of them are teachers from Head Start programs. So, there are all these different levels of education.

NW: The whole idea of art is, usually is getting ready for performance. So, what’s it like working in the process of real life?

NBS: It’s different. I mean, it’s really fun. We ended up writing songs in there about stuff people were going through. I liked it better than performing. I liked the interaction with the people, I liked planning it all out. I surprised myself with how much I liked it. I really did.

ZM: I didn’t think I would like it. Working with people in the community directly is something that I’ve never done. The people who really want a change and aren’t experienced, that’s what gets me going, as long as there is a purpose and I know that I am effecting somebody’s life.

NBS: And we learned so much in that whole planning process. We were going to put on a week workshop and we had these big ideas about stuff we were going to do at night. But all these were women with children, so we had to work out all the logistics.

ZM: How to get them there? What are we going to do with the kids

LPB: It was our community learning experience.

NW: Here you are working in process. You are working in real life, in community, which in the middle of it the law changes or something. Is there a struggle there for you? How does that feel?

LPB: Well, you know unfortunately we are always engaged in doing both. And I say unfortunately only because I think it limits our ability to do each of them the way we would like. We have long talked about the long-term goal having two units: having a unit that keeps this work in our community, it’s where we live, to keep that going, but also to have that wing that is the creative work. It is all creative work – but for the company to do the development of new work, the development of new workshops, the development of all the things that go outside our community. And it really ultimately is going to take the two focuses operating simultaneously to do the level of work we are going to do. We are doing that work now, but we can’t do either one at the level we want to. So, that ‘s what we have to move to.

NW: What did your major end up being?

ZM: Retail/consumer science with a minor in business and a minor in theater. I’ve got to go get my diploma. I walked out of graduation before it was over.

NW: Just thinking about your theater comrades, kids who came through with a major or minor in theater that you may have met, do you think this kind of work, working in community, is for all kinds of artists?

ZM: I think a lot of artists are goal-directed. You see a lot of cockiness, which I hate to say. So, they already have their mission laid out, things they want to do, their big star goals. And my agenda – I guess I see myself as more of a helper. I’ve got that Aquarian influence as a service sign. I want to say that’s just my astrology. But I think it’s personal; I like to help and change. And if there is always that element I could never get bored or tired.

NBS: When you were asking about what’s the difference – to me what’s so cool, if you are an actor, a singer, it depends on if you are going to write everything you do or if you are going to act somebody else’s script. But I felt like we were creating scripts there on the spot. And that was pretty exciting just to find so much creativity, and to find it with people that don’t even think they are creative. When you first come in and say that we’re going to write a song they’re all like, "We can’t write a song." But you start, "Yeah you can," and that’s real exciting to me. I remember the first time that Linda and I tried it, we ended up having a coffeehouse with the people that we worked with. We created good stuff. They would get up and read poetry that they had written or songs that they had written. That was just foreign to them at the beginning, but after we just wrote a simple song – the whole class. They all got real proud ownership of what they were writing. They had so much pride in what it was. Just the process of writing one song with them was way better than standing on a stage with people clapping for me. That’s fine. I’ve been a singer for about 30 years, but I felt like I had been there and done that. This was something really exciting to watch people find out that they are creative, too.

ZM: That’s the difference between people that feel the way she feels and I feel, and people that have an agenda.

NW: What do you think the impact of this kind of work has on the people who participate?

NBS: I think it helps bring people together.

ZM: Directly. And you are hitting them with information, you’re informing them, you’re educating them, you’re enlightening them and then you are giving them a sense of self-esteem and it is direct.

NBS: And they take that out to their communities.

NW: How do you measure that? How do you know that’s happening?

ZM: The feedback we get from them when we sit down and we go around the circle. We hear them. We hear them out. We say things about ourselves and what we’ve overcome through this experience. And all that feedback, you can see it –as they verbally tell you, in their drive to be creative.

NBS: When we did the week-long workshop, at the end of it did a graduation. We did our pieces that we had put together that started out as a memory of your favorite relative and ended up as the acting out of this whole scene. One girl brought her entire family. They had been having a lot of turmoil in that family. I really saw that family pulling together. It was pretty incredible.

NW: What’s important about people sitting down in a circle and talking about it and giving you that kind of feedback? How do you think that makes theater how you think theater ought to be?

ZM: I guess listening. Everybody needs somebody to listen to them and hear them out. If you don’t have a way to get all this internal information out and you are just walking around –

NBS: And people did listen.

NW: I want to know in terms of theater, why is it important to listen. Not in terms of how does it help, but in terms of the theater. Does it help make theater?

NBS: If you are listening you are going to find something interesting that you might want to create, or people might find common experiences that they can create something out of. And the way the circles were set up, people had their time to talk and no one else could talk. So they did listen to what each other said.

NW: But how does that impact theater?

LPB: Well, it is the foundation of theater. Unlike any other medium in terms of the written word, theater is designed to be performed. So, in order to return to your audience, your community, whatever – in order to return the information, what you are looking for is a reality of the experiences. That’s the foundation of all the dialogue. That’s the foundation of the story. And what you see in the stories that you hear. What you are looking for in terms of truth in the stories that you hear. And in terms, certainly in terms of western theater, that’s the foundation. It’s the word. It’s the stories. It’s the dialogue.

NW: For instance if you do a Broadway show, and the voices that come back to you are the critics, the applause and so forth –How is this different? And why is it important to you, in the work you do, , to have these round-table discussions?

NBS: I was just thinking of the play we did, which was a story about three generations and what happened to them – everybody in the audience, which was the people who came to the workshop, could relate to that in some way. I mean that’s what they wanted to talk about, their experience growing up. So, I felt like it touched people.

NW: I’m trying to get you to go the other way. How did it touch theater?

ZM: Maybe it adds a realistic element that we are always looking for. Being that involved in things that you’re not experienced of – like a woman dealing with the separation between her kids and her parents. You seeing that could then bring that realistic element – as an artist if you are ever confronted with a piece like that – to theater.

NW: Do you think it makes theater different, when you have the people that it’s about involved in the feedback directly?

LPB: Oh, absolutely. There are a couple of things. One is that we say very deliberately in our statements about who we are, that what we are trying to do is return stories to the community. We are the vehicle through which those stories come back. What we try to do is to seek out the lessons in the story for ourselves and for the community, too. It’s not like we are separate form the community in that way, in that context. A lot of people talk about, a lot of artists talk about how they feel outside the community, how they feel excluded. You know, some of that is because they challenge. But some of that is because they don’t feel that connection. We are very deliberate in our work. If you listen to the people that work with us, they are people that choose that connection. They want to be connected with community. And two – they understand that it’s a part of our mission that those stories are returned, returned in ways that are as honest as we can get them and also challenge us. Because some of the things that you hear in the stories are things that people have to challenge. And where do they find the will and the means to challenge?

Our theater has been accused of being celebratory. If you don’t show people the way to the victory than what are you doing retelling the story? It’s like John said about telling the story to make oneself better, or telling the story to make the community better. There is a difference between a storyteller and a liar. So, what we’re trying to be is storytellers, not liars. The importance of that relationship is key. It reshapes the story. If we are not getting to the truth, then what happens is there is feedback from the community. Now, the community sometimes is challenged and needs to be challenged, and sometimes they don’t like that. But that’s all a part of how we all grow. So, it’s not that we have to constantly please, what we constantly are working for is to strike the familiar in terms of what the community has told us and return it to the community. So, that’s just a part of what we do in our work.

NW: Your work with the young people is successful if – what?

ZM: If they progress personally from it. Right now, working in the piece. we haven’t gotten into that much work where I can say they’ll learn about this issue. But if they just learn, if they acquire a sense that they are further along with this, or they achieve projection, or they’ve gotten stage presence –

Nayo Watkins is an arts and community consultant who lives in Durham, N.C. She is sole proprietor of Bodacious Consulting and Organizing. Her work has included helping to build collaborations and partnerships between artists and communities that explore the relationship between art, culture, activism and empowerment. She served as coordinator for the Mississippi American Festival Project and for the N.C.-based Alternate ROOTS Community Artist Partnership Project. She was writer/facilitator for "Parables to Policy," an Internet project of Southern Rural Development Initiative and was consultant to the Mississippi Young Person’s Cultural Exchange. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, she served as executive director of the African American Dance Ensemble (Durham), At the Foot of the Mountain Theatre (Minneapolis), and the Mississippi Cultural Arts Coalition (Jackson), and as program assistant for the Afro-American Studies Program of the University of Mississippi. As an artist, Watkins is a poet, essayist, playwright and performer. Her poems and essays have appeared in literary anthologies and journals. As a playwright, she draws upon oral histories and participatory research to create plays rooted in place, people, culture and community. Productions of her commissioned plays have been staged in Port Gibson, Itta Bena and Oxford, Mississippi, and in Durham and Wake Forest, North Carolina. Her work is included in the repertory of actors John O’Neal, Cynthia Watts and Yolanda King.

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