The Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency

We are thrilled to announce the Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency, a momentous partnership between BCRW, The Public Theater and the Ntozake Shange Literary Trust, established in July 2022. The program was conceived by inaugural resident, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, to support distinguished women, femme, and non-binary scholar-playwrights of the African Diaspora for two-year terms, and to carry on the luminous legacy of Ntozake Shange, poet, playwright, and Barnard Alum, class of 1970. 

ERIKA DICKERSON-DESPENZA, INAUGURAL RESIDENT 

As a poet-playwright and womanist cultural memory worker, Erika Dickerson-Despenza is known for her engagements with Afrosurrealism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination, Black land legacies, environmental racism, and Black queer women’s interiority and erotic fugitivity. After serving as Tow Playwright-in-Residence from 2019-2020, she made her Public Theater debut in 2021 with cullud wattah, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning play about three generations of Black women living through the current water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Her upcoming production of shadow/land, directed by Candis C. Jones, will premiere at The Public in April 2023. During this residency, Dickerson-Despenza will focus on writing a new play, sweet rot: an intimate possession, a comedy-drama meditating on questions and costs of radical Black leftist politics in the Black American Theater. She will also formalize and expand the podcast series, “The Clearing,” into a series of interviews and interrogations of radical Blk women’s dramatic literature. She will also participate in a public event at Barnard in each of the two years, as well as offer masterclasses and collaborative research opportunities for Barnard students. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (2021), the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award (2020), and the Thom Thomas Award (2020). 

THE SHANGE RESIDENCY

A first-of-its-kind, the Shange Residency honors luminary poet, playwright, and Barnard alumnae Ntozake Shange (BC ‘70), one of the world’s most revered writers whose groundbreaking works include her Obie-winning choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf (1974) to novels Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Liliane (1994). Her vast oeuvre of over thirty-six published works and interdisciplinary collaborations with activists, dancers, directors, musicians, photographers, and singers have made her a rich and compelling interlocutor for generations of artistic and scholarly creators. 

The Shange Residency will support distinguished women, femme, and non-binary scholar-playwrights of the African Diaspora for two-year terms. Each year, the playwright in residence will participate in a public event and a master class for Barnard students to study and experiment with political theater. The residency will also create collaborative research opportunities for Barnard students in the arts and humanities. More information about the residency is available at [URL to press release]. Shange’s archive is available to researchers and artists through the Barnard Archives and Special Collections. For more information visit archives.barnard.edu. 

GRATITUDE

With enormous gratitude to inaugural resident Erika Dickerson-Despenza, to our collaborators, The Public Theater and the Ntozake Shange Literary Trust, and to Kim F. Hall (Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies), Kaiama L. Glover (Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies, Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center), and Elizabeth Castelli (former BCRW Director, Professor of Religion), who envisioned this partnership and worked tirelessly to realize it. 

BIOS

Ntozake Shange, increasingly recognized as one of America’s greatest writers, has for 50 years embodied the struggle of women of color for equality and the recognition of their contribution to human culture. Her “choreo-poem,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, recorded a two and a half year run on Broadway and has remained in print since 1974. That production retains its title as the longest-running play by an African American writer in Broadway history. A revival of for colored girls…, opened in the 2022 Broadway season to unanimous critical acclaim and seven Tony Award nominations. Ntozake’s literary legacy, preserved in the Shange Institute at Barnard College, comprises 13 plays, seven novels, six children’s books, and 19 poetry collections, the majority of which are published and in print. She is posthumously inducted into both the New York State Writers Association and the Off-Broadway Alliance Halls of Fame. Her poetry collection Wild Beauties was received enthusiastically in 2018. A posthumous re-issue of her popular If I Can Cook, You Know God Can was released in January 2019 and a semi-autobiographical work entitled Dance We Do in 2020–both from Beacon Press. A compendium of unpublished works by Ntozake Shange is due out from Hachette in early 2023.

Erika Dickerson-Despenza is a New Orleans-based Blk radical leftist poet-playwright and womanist cultural memory worker. Afrosurrealism, magical realism, narrative re/memory, kinesthetic imagination and Black queer women’s interiority and erotic fugitivity are conceptual preoccupations of her work. Erika’s primary thematic foci are Black land legacies, Black apocalyptic ritual, and environmental racism. Her work occupies sites of intimate reckoning, situating rupture in traditionally sacred or “safe” spaces to make invisible systems of environmental oppression and cultural trauma visible and ultimately ask us to consider abolitionist political ecologies. Her productions include shadow/land (The Public Theater, 2023), cullud wattah (The Public Theater, 2021), and [hieroglyph] (San Francisco Playhouse/Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, 2021). Currently, Erika is developing a 10-play Katrina Cycle, which centers climate crisis-induced and state-sanctioned water vulnerabilities and displacement rippling in and beyond New Orleans and the Midwest. These works explore the politics of disgust, shame and refusal by highlighting the rupture of government intervention at the intersection of capitalism and environmental racism and its impact on dispossessed peoples. Dickerson-Despenza has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (2021), the Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award (2020), the Thom Thomas Award (2020), the Lilly Award (2020), the Barrie and Bernice Stavis Award (2020), the Grist 50 Fixer (2020), and the Princess Grace Playwriting Award (2019). She has received residencies and fellowships including Tow Playwright-in-Residence at The Public Theater (2019-2020), U.S. Water Alliance National Arts & Culture Delegate (2019), New York Stage and Film Fellow-in-Residence (2019), New Harmony Project Writer-in Residence (2019), Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow (2018-2019), and The Lark Van Lier New Voices Fellow (2018). Her commissions include work for Climate Change Theatre Action, The Public Theater, Studio Theatre & Williamstown Theatre Festival. She was previously a member of Grist, Ars Nova Play Group (2019-2021) and Youngblood Collective (2018-2021). 

Now known as the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Barnard Women’s Center was the first of its kind in the country. Founded in 1971 by Barnard students, faculty, and staff in the midst of feminist, Black freedom, anti-war, and Third World Liberation movements, international student mobilizations, and the parallel creation of Black studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies programs at universities across the country. For 50 years, BCRW has built a bridge between students, scholars, activists, artists, neighbors, and our communities beyond New York through public events, publications, multimedia projects, and working groups. From our signature annual Scholar and Feminist Conference to our peer-reviewed journal The Scholar and Feminist Online, our unique collection of feminist social movement ephemera housed in the Barnard College Archives and a constantly expanding video archive, and the Social Justice Initiative and the new Ntozake Shange Social Justice Theater Residency, BCRW brings scholars and activists together to foment intersectional social justice feminist analyses and promote social transformation.  

The Ntozake Shange Literary Trust was established by Ntozake Shange in 2017 and commissioned to preserve, manage and promote the Shange literary legacy comprising 13 plays, seven novels and 19 poetry collections. Directed by the Executor of the Shange estate, Paul T. Williams, Jr. and managed by Literary Trustee, Donald S. Sutton, the Trust has, since Ntozake’s passing in 2018, published three books, re-issued the play for colored girls… in print and oversees development of two new volumes of archival works drawn on the Shange Archives at Barnard College. Adaptations of Shange works in the opera format and performance art genre continue in current development. Celebrated revivals of for colored girls… at The Public Theater in 2019 and on Broadway in 2022 were presented by license from the Trust, the latter garnering a straight play record for the season of seven TONY Award nominations.

The Public Theater continues the work of its visionary founder Joe Papp as a civic institution engaging, both on-stage and off, with some of the most important ideas and social issues of today. Conceived over 60 years ago as one of the nation’s first nonprofit theaters, The Public has long operated on the principles that theater is an essential cultural force and that art and culture belong to everyone. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham, The Public’s wide breadth of programming includes an annual season of new work at its landmark home at Astor Place, Free Shakespeare in the Park at The Delacorte Theater in Central Park, the Mobile Unit touring throughout New York City’s five boroughs, Public Forum, Under the Radar, Public Lab, Public Works, Public Shakespeare Initiative, and Joe’s Pub. Since premiering HAIR in 1967, The Public continues to create the canon of American Theater and is currently represented on Broadway by the Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda and the upcoming production of Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper. Their programs and productions can also be seen regionally across the country and around the world. The Public has received 60 Tony Awards, 184 Obie Awards, 56 Drama Desk Awards, 59 Lortel Awards, 34 Outer Critic Circle Awards, 13 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, 58 AUDELCO Awards, 6 Antonyo Awards, and 6 Pulitzer Prizes.

Image detail: Left, Ntozake Shange, 1976, sourced from Britannica. Right, Ntozake Shange photograph for the Reid Lecture, Women Issues Luncheon, BCRW, November 1978 (edited for contrast, and to remove spots and stains, by Chris Woodrich).