Winner of the Center for Fiction's 2016 First Novel Prize The hotly anticipated first novel by lauded playwright and The Wire TV writer Kia Corthron, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter sweeps American history from 1941 to the twenty-first century through the lives of four men--two white brothers from rural Alabama, and two black brothers from small-town Maryland--whose journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families. On the eve of America's entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall--a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker--begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B.J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter--gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight--grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt. The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron's ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America's past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences. Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America's most recently recognized treasures.

“A delight and highly recommended.” —Booklist “Showcases the truth and fullness of people of color.” —Book Riot In the tradition of Best American Short Stories comes Everyday People: The Color of Life, a dazzling collection of contemporary short fiction. Everyday People is a thoughtfully curated anthology of short stories that presents new and renowned work by established and emerging writers of color. It illustrates the dynamics of character and culture that reflect familial strife, political conflict, and personal turmoil through an array of stories that reveal the depth of the human experience. Representing a wide range of styles, themes, and perspectives, these selected stories depict moments that linger—crossroads to be navigated, relationships, epiphanies, and times of doubt, loss, and discovery. A celebration of writing and expression, Everyday People brings to light the rich tapestry that binds us all. The contributors are an eclectic mix of award-winning and critically lauded writers, including Mia Alvar, Carleigh Baker, Nana Brew-Hammond, Glendaliz Camacho, Alexander Chee, Mitchell S. Jackson, Yiyun Li, Allison Mills, Courttia Newland, Denne Michele Norris, Jason Reynolds, Nelly Rosario, Hasanthika Sirisena, and Brandon Taylor. Some of the proceeds from the sale of Everyday People will benefit the Rhode Island Writers Colony, a nonprofit organization founded by the late Brook Stephenson that provides space for speculation, production, and experimentation by writers of color.

Filled with practical advice from an award-winning playwright, with a range of resources to guide you in the craft and business of theatre writing, The Art of Writing for the Theatre provides everything you need to write like a seasoned theatre professional, including: * how to analyze and break down a script * how to write a wide range of plays * how to critique a theatre production * how to construct and craft critical essays, cover letters, and theatrical resumes This thorough introduction is supplemented with exercises and new interviews with a host of internationally acclaimed playwrights, lyricists, and critics, including Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Lyn Gardner, Octavio Solis, Ismail Khalidi, and David Zippel, among many others. Accompanying online resources include playwriting and script analysis worksheets and exercises, an example of a playwriting resume, and critical points to consider on playwriting, design, acting, directing and choreography.

What is home? The answer seems obvious. But Telling Our Stories of Home, an international collection of eleven plays by and about women from Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Uganda, Palestine, Brazil, India, UK, and the US, complicates the answer. The "answer" includes stories as far-ranging as: enslaved women trying to create a home, one by any means necessary, and one in the ocean; siblings wrestling with their differing devotion to home after their mother's death; a family wrestling with the government's refusal to allow the burial of their soldier-son in their hometown; a young scholar attempting to feel at home after studying abroad; a young man fleeing home due to his sexual orientation only to discover the difficulty of creating home elsewhere, and Siddis (Indians of African descent) continuing to struggle for acceptance despite having lived in India for over 600 years. These are voices seldom represented to a larger audience. The plays and performance pieces range from 20 to 90-minute pieces and include a mix of monologue, duologue, and ensemble plays. Short yet powerful, they allow fantastic performance opportunities particularly in an age of social-distancing with flexible casts that together invite the theme of home to be performed and studied on the page. The plays include: The House by Arzé Khodr (Lebanon), Happy by Kia Corthron (US), The Blue of the Island by Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti), Nine Lives by Zodwa Nyoni (UK), Leaving, but Can't Let Go by Lupe Gehrenbeck (Venezuela), Questions of Home by Doreen Baingana (Uganda), On the Last Day of Spring by Fidaa Zidan (Palestine) Letting Go and Moving On by Louella Dizon San Juan (US), Antimemories of an Interrupted Trip by Aldri Anunciação (Brazil), So Goes We by Jacqueline E. Lawton (US), and Those Who Live Here, Those Who Live There by Geeta P. Siddi and Girija P. Siddi (India)

Still the Best Guide for Getting Published If you want to get published, read this book! Comprehensive index lists dozens of subjects and categories to help you find the perfect publisher or agent. Jeff Herman’s Guide unmasks nonsense, clears confusion, and unlocks secret doorways to success for new and veteran writers! This highly respected resource is used by publishing insiders everywhere and has been read by millions all over the world. Jeff Herman’s Guide is the writer’s best friend. It reveals the names, interests, and contact information of thousands of agents and editors. It presents invaluable information about more than 350 publishers and imprints (including Canadian and university presses), lists independent book editors who can help you make your work more publisher-friendly, and helps you spot scams. Jeff Herman’s Guide unseals the truth about how to outsmart the gatekeepers, break through the barriers, and decipher the hidden codes to getting your book published. Countless writers have achieved their highest aspirations by following Herman’s outside-the-box strategies. If you want to reach the top of your game and transform rejections into contracts, you need this book!

Women are at the center of American theatre and have the potential to shape the cultural imagination of theatre-goers as a complex new era unfolds. Sarah Ruhl, one of the twenty-first century's most honored playwrights, is read in concert with her contemporaries whose writing also wrestles with the vexing issues facing Americans in the new century.

Historical Dictionary of Contemporary American Theater. Second Edition covers theatrical practice and practitioners as well as the dramatic literature of the United States of America from 1930 to the present. The 90 years covered by this volume features the triumph of Broadway as the center of American drama from 1930 to the early 1960s through a Golden Age exemplified by the plays of Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Lorraine Hansberry, and Edward Albee, among others. The impact of the previous modernist era contributed greatly to this period of prodigious creativity on American stages. This volume will continue through an exploration of the decline of Broadway as the center of U.S. theater in the 1960s and the evolution of regional theaters, as well as fringe and university theaters that spawned a second Golden Age at the millennium that produced another – and significantly more diverse – generation of significant dramatists including such figures as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irené Fornes, Beth Henley, Terrence McNally, Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, and numerous others. The impact of the Great Depression and World War II profoundly influenced the development of the American stage, as did the conformist 1950s and the revolutionary 1960s on in to the complex times in which we currently live. Historical Dictionary of the Contemporary American Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 1.000 cross-referenced entries on plays, playwrights, directors, designers, actors, critics, producers, theaters, and terminology. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about American theater.

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed. With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre: * R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur? * What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk? * What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways? * How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive? * Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

An exploration of NYC and America in the burgeoning moments before the start of the Civil War through the eyes of a young, biracial girl—the highly anticipated new novel from the winner of the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. "Corthron, a true heir to James Baldwin, presents a startlingly original exposure of the complex roots of American racism." —Naomi Wallace, MacArthur "Genius" Playwriting Fellow and author of One Flea Spare In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers. Throughout her formative years, Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P.T. Barnum's sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder, amidst the daily maelstrom of Five Points work, hardship, and camaraderie. Meanwhile, white America's attitudes towards people of color and slavery are shifting—painfully, transformationally—as the nation divides and marches to war. As with her first novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, which was praised by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, among many others, Corthron's use of dialogue brings her characters to life in a way that only an award-winning playwright and scriptwriter can do. As Theo grows and attends school, her language and grammar change, as does her own vocabulary when she's with her Black or Irish families. It's an extraordinary feat and a revelation for the reader. "Moon and the Mars, [Corthron's] latest masterpiece, is an absorbing story of family and community, of Africans and Irish, of settler and native, of slavery and abolition, of a city and a nation wracked by Civil War and racist violence, of love won and lost." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original