The 2024 Freedom To Create Fundraising Gala Featuring Caryl Phillips and Doralee Brooks

Join us for the 2024 Freedom to Create Gala — City of Asylum’s annual fundraising event — where we gather to honor an international writer who shares our mission to protect and celebrate creative freedom of expression. This year’s honoree is two-time Booker Prize nominee Caryl Phillips. In addition to the keynote address from Caryl, the Gala will feature a reading from Poet Laureate of Allegheny County, Doralee Brooks, and live music from Pittsburgh percussionist, Thomas Wendt and band. 

The evening begins with a cocktail hour, and includes live music with Thomas Wendt, a silent auction, a reading by Doralee Brooks, the keynote address by Caryl Phillips and a three-course meal from award-winning chef, Maurizio Esposito of Cucina Alfabeto.  

About the Speakers:

Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and grew up in Britain. His plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983) and he won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). His novels include The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), The Nature of Blood (1997), Dancing in the Dark (2005), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) to name a few. He also has several non-fiction works, and is the editor of two anthologies. Caryl’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at universities all over the world, and in 1999 was the University of the West Indies Humanities Scholar of the Year. Formerly Henry R. Luce Professor of Migration and Social Order at Columbia University, he has been Professor of English at Yale University since 2005. 

Doralee Brooks holds an MEd from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Carlow University. She is Professor Emerita of Developmental Studies at the Community College of Allegheny County. In 1995, Doralee became a fellow of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, a national writing project for teachers of kindergarten through college who endorse the practice of writing instruction in every discipline. In 1997, she led a community group for girls in Homestead who called themselves The Spice Writers. In 1997 and 1999, Doralee received fellowships to Cave Canem. Currently, Doralee facilitates writing workshops in poetry at Carlow University, and her poems have appeared in several journals including Voices from the Attic, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Uppagus, Dos Passos Review, and Paterson Literary Review. Her chapbook, “When I Hold You Up to the Light,” won the 2019 Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Prize sponsored by Main Street Rag.