2016-2017 Events

September 9, 2016, 7:00 p.m., Cabe Theatre
Playwright’s Theatre: A Stupid Game of Dungeons and Dragons

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.

A Stupid Game of Dungeons and Dragons by Eric Walker (Hendrix class of 2016) won first place in the 2015–2016 Student Playwriting Contest. According to the contest judge, Tearrance Chisholm, it “is a smart play about a group of friends who meet up for a game of Dungeons and Dragons . . . Typical DnD madness ensues, but the game has real-life ramifications for everyone involved.” An audience and cast discussion will follow the reading. Co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance.

October 6, 2016, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall
“Screenwriting, Race, and Being Creatively Maladjusted” by Kevin Willmott

 Kevin Willmott, a professor in the Media and Film Studies Department at Kansas University, is a playwright and screenwriter whose research interests include screenwriting, producing, African-American film history, directing, and filmmaking. His best-known works include the screenplay for Chi-Raq (2015, directed by Spike Lee), an adaptation of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes set against the backdrop of gang violence in Chicago; and C.S.A: Confederate States Of America, about what America would be like if the South had won the Civil War. A native of Junction City, Kansas, Willmott earned his B.A. in Drama at Marymount College and his M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

October 20, 2016, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall
“All the Luck You'll Ever Need: A Tale from Alaska” by Daryl Farmer

Daryl Farmer is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska—Fairbanks, where he teaches nonfiction and fiction writing. He is the author of the story collection Where We Land and a nonfiction book, Bicycling Beyond the Divide: Two Journeys into the West, which received a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and was a Colorado Book Award finalist. Born in Colorado Springs, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, he developed a taste for the open road at an early age and has spent much time roaming the country and writing about its landscapes and people—along the way earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

November 11, 2016, 11:11 a.m., Young-Wise Memorial Stadium Plaza
Veterans Day Readings on Peace and War

Hendrix and community residents will hold a collective reading in tribute to those whose lives have been touched by military service or war. The event will take place by the statue that honors the sacrifices that Hendrix alumni have made for their country. Co-sponsored by Dr. Alex Vernon and the Department of English. 

February 9, 2017, 11:10 a.m., Murphy Seminar Room
Director’s Discussion with Tony Horne

 Tony Horne, Murphy Visiting Theatre Director, will discuss dramatic and literary considerations behind the direction of the play The Sparrow by Chris Mathews, Jake Minton, and Nathan Allen. [See February 22–25, 2017, for play performance schedule.]

February 22–25, 2017, 7:30 p.m.
Wednesday–Friday, 2:00 p.m. Saturday,
Cabe Theatre
The Sparrow by Chris Mathews, Jake Minton, and Nathan Allen

Tony Horne, educator, arts manager, performer, director, and choreographer, will direct a student theatrical production of The Sparrow, by Chris Mathews, Jake Minton, and Nathan Allen, about a teen with unusual hidden powers that could either save or destroy her hometown. Tony Horne co-founded the Memphis Black Repertory Theatre and served as its administrative director from 1997 to 2000. He also served as treasurer for Black Theatre Network, a national organization that promotes African-American theatre. He is currently an associate professor of music theatre and directing at the Peck School of Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. 

March 9, 2017, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall
An Evening with Murphy Visiting Poet Aracelis Girmay

 Aracelis Girmay, Assistant Professor of Poetry at Hampshire College, is a California-born poet who has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and winner of the 2015 Whiting Award. Her works include Teeth (2007), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and the collage-based picture book changing, changing (2005). Her poetry and essays have been published in Granta, Black Renaissance Noire, and PEN America, among other places. Her newest collection, The Black Maria (2016), investigates African diasporic histories, the consequences of racism within American culture, and the question of human identity. Whatever her subject—dreams, transformation, the body, political imagination—her poems have been praised for their freshness and force. 

March 30, 2017, 7:30 p.m., Mills C
"Making the Myth Real: W. H. Auden's Homer and the ‘Shield of Achilles'" by Catherine Schlegel

 Catherine Schlegel, an expert in Greek and Roman poetry as well as translation and reception studies, will deliver a lecture on Auden’s reworking of Homer’s Iliad in “The Shield of Achilles.” An award-winning teacher and director of undergraduate studies for the Classics program at the University of Notre Dame, she is the author of Satire and the Threat of Speech: Horace’s Satires Book I, and co-author with Henry Weinfield of Hesiod: The Works and Days and Theogony: A Verse Translation and Commentary. 

April 27, 2017, 4:30 p.m., Murphy Seminar Room
The Aonian/Hendrix-Murphy Literary Contest Winners’ Reception and Reading

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.