Contributors
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Ellah Allfrey, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, is formerly the Deputy Editor of Granta. Before joining the editorial staff at Granta, she served as Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House. She sits on the board of the Writers’ Centre Norwich and is Deputy Chair of the Council of the Caine Prize and a patron of the new Etisalat Prize for Literature. In addition to judging the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2011, she also served as the judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing, and the next year she chaired the panel for the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is author of the introduction to Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (2012). In 2011, she received an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for her services to the publishing industry.
Ifa Bayeza is author of numerous plays, including Amistad Voices, Club Harlem, Kid Zero, Homer G & the Rhapsodies, for which she received a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays fellowship, and her latest work, Welcome to Wandaland! For her play The Ballad of Emmett Till, a version of which is in the summer 2012 issue of Callaloo (35.3), she received a 2007 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Center Fellowship, the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Play, and in 2010, four Ovation Awards, four Drama Desk Critics Circle Awards, and six Backstage Garland Awards including Best Playwriting. She is also a lyricist, composer, director, and novelist. With her sister Ntozake Shange, Bayeza co-authored the novel Some Sing, Some Cry (2010), which she adapted as a musical, Charleston Olio, in 2011. She is a visiting senior lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies and an artist-in-residence with Rites and Reason Theatre at Brown University in Providence, RI.
Frank Bowling, OBE, was born in Guyana, and is one of the most distinguished artists in the United Kingdom, where he has lived since 1950, when he was sixteen years old. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he studied at the Chelsea School of Art and later the Royal College of Art, to which he won a scholarship and, upon graduation in 1962, was awarded a Silver Medal in Painting. His work has been exhibited in museums throughout Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has also taught at such British and American institutions as the University of Reading, the Kingston School of Art (Surrey), Rutgers University, and Columbia University. His work has garnered for him numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the Royal Academy of Arts (England), and an appointment to Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008. He lives in London and New York.
Courtney Bryan, a New Orleans native, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests,” declares the New York Times. She performs around the New York City area, serves as organist and director of the Institute of Sacred Music at Bethany Baptist Church of Newark, New Jersey, and has also performed in the St. Paul’s Chapel Concert Series and in the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp. Shedding Skin for orchestra, her most recent composition, was performed by the American Composers Orchestra at the Miller Theatre in New York. A graduate of Oberlin’s Conservatory, she also holds master’s degrees from Rutgers University and Columbia University, where she is studying for the DMA degree in music composition. [End Page 834]
Rita Dove is the editor of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011, paperback edition due out in the fall of 2013). The most recent of her nine poetry collections are Sonata Mulattica (2009), American Smooth (2004), and On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999). A book of short stories, Fifth Sunday, was published in 1985 in the Callaloo Fiction Series. Her novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992) was widely acclaimed as a coming of age tale, and her drama The Darker Face of the Earth was produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and the Royal National Theatre in London, among many other venues. In 1998 the Boston Symphony debuted her song cycle “Seven for Luck” with music by John Williams...
