City of Asylum
Giving Voice.
In her first visit to City of Asylum, Selby Wynn Schwartz shares her ode to The Poetess. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Selby’s debut novel, "After Sappho," connects a myriad of women inspired by the ghost of Sappho to wrest their freedom and desire from the page.
The #notwhite collective in-dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous, and immigrant artists and arts administrators.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews with leading August Wilson actors, directors, and artists—regional and national. Hosted and moderated by Chris Rawson, a veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette theater critic who chronicled Wilson’s career and became a friend. December's interview features actor and director Brandon Dirden.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews with leading August Wilson actors, directors, and artists—regional and national. Hosted and moderated by Chris Rawson, a veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette theater critic who chronicled Wilson’s career and became a friend. The goal is to capture the memories, anecdotes, and insights of those who know Wilson’s epic American Century Cycle from the inside.
The #notwhite collective in-dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous, and immigrant artists and arts administrators. The series reimagines the past and present history of the arts sector by engaging and presenting the wealth of experience, strategies, and tactics of the global majority, notwhite descendants, inheritors of colonialism, indigenous, and immigrants who navigate a predominantly white arts sector.
November’s conversation feature ROSIE GORDON-WALLACE (6:00 PM) and DOMINIQUE ENRIQUEZ (7:00 PM)
Rico Parker has strong spiritual ties to the work of August Wilson. He has acted in only three of the plays, but in “King Hedley II,” he played one of the most difficult, complex lead roles in unusually difficult circumstances. Hear his thoughtful responses to the personal connections that make such work possible. Register to see it (just your zip code required) and send the link to August Wilson fans among your friends!
What would life be without pondering ambition, art, family, and desire? Novelists Jill Bialosky and Lynn Steger Strong explore these themes and more in their latest respective novels, The Deceptions and Flight.
Celebrating and recognizing arts and cultural workers, especially those who tend to be under the radar and forgotten about, the #notwhite collective has featured speakers from southwestern PA as well as national leaders in the arts.
October’s conversation features Shey Rivera.
The #notwhite collective is a group of thirteen women artists whose mission is to use non-individualist, multi-disciplinary art to make our stories visible as we relate, connect, and belong to the global majority.
Along with an active career on film and TV, Russell Hornsby has starred in five August Wilson plays, most notably in Denzel Washington’s “Fences” (both on Broadway and on film) and in the title role in “King Hedley II” at the Signature Theatre. His compelling interview is one of the most thoughtful, insightful in the 33 sessions of the Actors Talk August series. Register to see it (just your zip code required) and send the link to August Wilson fans among your friends!
These two Pittsburgh actors are featured in “Jitney,” playing into September, 2022, in the theater in the back of August Wilson House in the Hill District. The interview is a stimulating, smart discussion, especially of the father-son emotions of Booster (Berry) and Doub (Timbers), as well as in the many other August Wilson plays they have done for the Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre.
Celebrating and recognizing arts and cultural workers, especially those who tend to be under the radar and forgotten about, the #notwhite collective has featured speakers from southwestern PA as well as national leaders in the arts. August’s conversation features Natiq Jalil and Victoria Snyder.
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators.
The series reimagines the past and present history of the arts sector by engaging and presenting the wealth of experience, strategies, and tactics of the global majority, notwhite descendants, inheritors of colonialism, indigenous and immigrants who navigate a predominantly white arts sector.
Celebrate the global release of What You Need to Know About Me, a powerful new anthology that centers on the immigration narratives of young people between the ages of 11 and 24.
Edited by Yalie Saweda Kamara, the anthology’s eighty-four young writers share their dreams, hopes, fears, and realities with unrelenting candor, tenderness, and strength. The anthology’s entries challenge perceptions of migration and identity and compel readers to view these stories with open-mindedness and compassion.
This is an unusual interview for Actors Talk August: a duo of young actors just finishing their first August Wilson play. Brenden Peifer and Melessie Clark are playing Sterling and Risa in “Two Trains Running,” directed by Justin Emeka at Pittsburgh Public Theater (through June 19). Their first encounter with August Wilson traditions, characters and an experienced cast feeds plenty of thought by two lively, smart, responsive professionals just starting their August Wilson journeys.
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators.
The series reimagines the past and present history of the arts sector by engaging and presenting the wealth of experience, strategies, and tactics of the global majority, notwhite descendants, inheritors of colonialism, indigenous and immigrants who navigate a predominantly white arts sector.
June’s program features artists: Staycee Pearl and Kuldeep Singh
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators.
The series reimagines the past and present history of the arts sector by engaging and presenting the wealth of experience, strategies, and tactics of the global majority, notwhite descendants, inheritors of colonialism, indigenous and immigrants who navigate a predominantly white arts sector.
May’s program features artists Raul Moarquech and Toi Derricotte
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews, with leading August Wilson actors, directors and artists, national and regional. Hosted and moderated by Chris Rawson, veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette theater critic who chronicled Wilson’s career and became a friend. The goal is to capture the memories, anecdotes and insights of those who know Wilson’s epic American Century Cycle from the inside.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews, with leading August Wilson actors, directors and artists, national and regional. Hosted and moderated by Chris Rawson, veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette theater critic who chronicled Wilson’s career and became a friend. The goal is to capture the memories, anecdotes and insights of those who know Wilson’s epic American Century Cycle from the inside.
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators. April’s program features artists Marika Constantino & DS Kinsel.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews, with leading August Wilson actors, directors and artists, national and regional. Featuring Ron OJ Parson is working now on his 30th August Wilson production, sometimes as an actor but mainly a director, where he is just one-and-a-half shows short of completing his 10-play Cycle. His long journey allowed him to persuade Chicago’s Court Theatre to consider Wilson a classic, along with other Black playwrights. He says, “I like to bring August into the room.”
This sumptuous English-language ‘50s piece recounts the mid-life years of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop (play by Mirando Otto, Lord of the Rings), when she left America to live and write in Rio de Janiero. In Brazil Bishop would also fall in love with well-off architect Lota de Macedo Soares. Initial hostilities between the pair make way for a complicated yet long-lasting love affair that dramatically alters Bishop’s relationship to the world around her.
Chuck Smith is a long-time, active August Wilson director, a resident director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, where he’s supervised and directed Wilson plays (including Gem of the Ocean, which just closed) and, during his free time, a regular director at the West coast Black Theatre Troupe in Sarasota. He seems to know just about everyone in the Wilsonian theater universe. We’ll have a good time talking!
Film historian and writer Wil Haygood visits City of Asylum to discuss his newest book “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World. Wil is joined in conversation by Pittsburgh filmmaker and activist Emmai Alaquiva.
The #notwhite collective in-Dialogue series features conversations with BIPOC, AALANA, indigenous and immigrant artists and arts administrators. March’s conversation features Bekezela Mguni & Erin Perry.
This is a virtual-only event hosted via City of Asylum @ Home. A poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity, and addiction, Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s NY Times’ Editor’s Pick debut work. Brian’s early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys... more →
Cole Arthur Riley is a Pittsburgh raised writer and creator of Black Liturgies (@blackliturgies), daily spiritual reflections on Instagram. Cole joins City of Asylum to read from her debut collection, This Here Flesh, which weaves stories from three generations of her family to discover the “necessary rituals” that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation.
Award winning writers Patrick Rosal and David Wright Faladé join us in virtual conversation to celebrate the launch of their new works, Faladé’s novel Black Cloud Rising and Rosal’s poetry collection The Last Thing.
Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (1959) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro.
August Wilson House celebrates America’s greatest playwright with substantial insider interviews, with leading August Wilson actors, directors and artists, national and regional. Hosted and moderated by Chris Rawson, veteran Pittsburgh Post-Gazette theater critic who chronicled Wilson’s career and became a friend. The goal is to capture the memories, anecdotes and insights of those who know Wilson’s epic American Century Cycle from the inside.
Margarita is a charming film and is the latest feature from lesbian co-directors Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona who brought us the 2007 drama Finn’s Girl.
