2017-2018 Events

Playwright’s Theatre, an extension of the Foundation’s Playwriting Contest, produces dramatic readings of new plays by current or former Hendrix students. Cast, crew, and director are also Hendrix alumni and students.

The Immortal Katie Stewart by Allison Price (Hendrix class of 2017) won first place in the 2016–2017 Student Playwriting Contest. The play is about what happens “when a fairy godmother gives a young girl the opportunity to become Cinderella and she decides to become immortal instead,” according to Price. Playwriting contest judge Sofya Weitz described the play as a “delightful, funny, and fast-moving story.”  

Murphy Visiting Poet Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the PEN Open Book Award, NAACP Image                                         Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; two plays; and a number of video   collaborations. She has edited several anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Among her numerous awards and honors, she is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. 

Ashlie Atkinson, Murphy Visiting Theatre Director, will discuss dramatic and literary considerations behind the direction of the play Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes by Liz Duffy Adams. [See February 21–24, 2018, for play performance schedule.]

Arkansas-born New Yorker Ashlie Atkinson (Hendrix Class of 2001), award-winning playwright and actor of stage, film, and television, will direct a student theatrical production of Wet or, Isabella the Pirate Queen Enters the Horse Latitudes by Liz Duffy Adams. “Female pirates and drag queens; knife fights and blank verse; danger, love and really bad weather . . . [the play] is a theatrical adventure on the high seas and a liquid meditation on the notion of freedom,” says Adams.

Genaro Kỳ Lý Smith was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam. He earned an M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He is the author of The Land Baron’s Sun: The Story of Lý Loc and His Seven Wives (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press), which won the 2016 Indie Book Award in poetry, and the novel The Land South of the Clouds (University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press). His other works of poetry and fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies.

Philip Waddell, an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, will deliver a lecture on the reception of the emperor Nero in modern creative works and its foundation in Latin authors. Dr. Waddell’s research interests include Tacitus, Roman and Greek historiography, and rhetoric. He has published in The Art of History: Literary Perspectives on Greek and Roman Historiography and is                               currently working on his first monograph. 

Playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner, best known for his two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, is also the author of A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change, among other works. He is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, a Lifetime Achievement in the American Theatre Award, and Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013.

Winners of the Hendrix-Murphy Literary Contest will read their entries during a reception that also celebrates the debut of this year’s campus literary and visual art magazine, the Aonian.