August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle

Notes on Contributors

notes on contributors Herman Beavers is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania . He is the author of the chapbook A Neighborhood of Feeling and the critical study Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. His poems have appeared most recently in Cross Connect, Peregrine, and Callaloo. During the 2009–2010 academic year he was a visiting fellow in African American Studies at Princeton University. Yvonne Chambers has devoted nearly 30 years to practicing law but never lost her interest in theater. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio, takes theater classes at Ohio State University, and serves as a volunteer play reader with the Contemporary American Theatre Company. Soyica Diggs Colbert,assistantprofessorof EnglishatDartmouthCollege, has published articles on James Baldwin, Alice Childress, and August Wilson. She is currently working on a book that examines how the physical space of the theater and the discursive space of the page relate to the dislocation enacted by trans-Atlantic slavery. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He is the author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson and is coeditor of African American Performance and Theater History and Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Performance and Popular Culture. His articles have appeared in American Drama, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal , and Text and Performance Quarterly, as well as journals in Israel, Taiwan, and Poland, and in several critical anthologies. Nathan Grant is an associate professor of English at Saint Louis University and editor of African American Review. He is the author of Masculinist Impulses: Toomer, Hurston, Black Writing and Modernity, and has also written several articles and book chapters on African American literature, theater, film, television, and popular culture. David LaCroix isanindependentscholarandresearcher.HehastaughtatWake Forest University and the University of Kentucky. A specialist in African American literature, his work includes articles on Gayl Jones and Octavia Butler. 224 Notes on Contributors Barbara Lewis is director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black History and Culture at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, where she holds a joint appointment as associate professor in Africana Studies and English. Her original drama has been presented at festivals and on professional stages nationally and internationally. From 2000 to 2002, she edited the journal Black Renaissance/ Renaissance Noire. For over fifteen years, she covered the arts scene in New York, writing for Essence, the Amsterdam News, the Soho Weekly News, and Ms. Magazine. Alan Nadel, William T. Bryan Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky, is the author of Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison andtheAmericanCanon,ContainmentCulture,FlatliningontheFieldofDreams: Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan’s America, and Television in Black-and-White America: Race and National Identity and the editor of May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays in the Drama of August Wilson. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including American Literary History, Henry James Review, American Drama, Theater, Modern Fiction Studies, College Literature, Film Quarterly, Georgia Review, and Centennial Review. Donald E. Pease, Avalon Professor of Humanities at Dartmouth College, is the author of The New American Exceptionalism and Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context and the coeditor of several books, including American Renaissance Rediscovered and Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. HefoundedtheDartmouthInstitutefortheFutureofAmericanStudiesandhas been awarded the Guggenheim, NEH, Ford, Mellon, and Hewlett fellowships. Sandra G. Shannon, professor of African American studies at Howard University , is the author of The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, August Wilson’s Fences: A Reference Guide, and coeditor of August Wilson and Black Aesthetics. A past editor of Theatre Topics Journal and past president of the Black Theatre Network, her publications on August Wilson have appeared in The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights, August Wilson: A Casebook, and African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, among other places. Vivian Gist Spencer isprofessorofEnglishandTheatreArtsatAnneArun­ delCommunityCollegeinArnold,Maryland.Other recent publications include an essay on August Wilson’s “Urban Entrepreneurs,” which illustrates the economic success of Wilson’s characters in the industrial North despite Wilson’s contention of the black exodus from the South being a cultural tragedy. Notes on Contributors 225 Anthony Stewart is associate professor in the English Department at Dalhousie University. His main research interest is twentieth- and...