Pearl Cleage
Pearl Cleage is a playwright, novelist, poet and political activist. Cleage’s plays and novels deal with themes of racism, sexism and feminism. Her plays, novels, poems and essays have been anthologized and are the subject of scholarly analysis. Her best-known plays, Flying West (1992) and Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995), have been performed in regional theatres across the United States. In 1996, Blues for an Alabama Sky was performed during the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games as part of the Cultural Olympiad. She is the Playwright in Residence at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre.
“As a playwright and as a citizen, I want to create work that expands our idea of American history by telling the stories I know as an African-American woman living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. I am particularly interested in the last 50 years of our city’s racial history and the ways in we who live and work and walk our dogs on former Civil War battlefields are still surrounded by the ghosts of that conflict. There is no more appropriate place to consider these questions than Ford’s Theatre, where President Lincoln’s blood was actually shed on April 14, 1865.” —Pearl Cleage