2019 - 2020 Events

September 6, 2019, 7:00 p.m., Cabe Theatre 

Playwright’s Theatre: Pie Town by John Haman

Playwright’s Theatre, an extension of the Foundation’s Playwriting Contest, produces dramatic readings of new plays by current or former Hendrix students. Pie Town by John Haman (Hendrix class of 1987) won first place in the 2018-2019 Alumni Playwriting Contest. The play is about Sawyer, a newspaper editor, who returns to the Arkansas Delta on a quest to transform the village of Beulah into “Pie Town, Arkansas,” but her quest is complicated by “a sinister rival for the town's affections—a man she longs to unmask as a fraud and a violent abuser,” according to Haman. An audience and cast discussion will follow the reading. Co-sponsored by the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance.

October 24, 2019, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall

An Evening with Murphy Visiting Poets Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs

Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs, a married couple, are both acclaimed poets. Brown graduated from the University of Louisville, and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of Sister, Fanny Says, and To Those Who Were Our First Gods. Jacobs holds an MFA from Perdue University, where she served as editor-in-chief of Sycamore Review, and a BA from Smith College. She is the author of Pelvis with Distance, In Whatever Light Left to Us, and Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going.

November 21, 2019, 7:30 p.m., Mills C 

An Evening with Murphy Visiting Classics Speaker Michele Salzman 

Dr. Michele Salzman is one of the leading scholars of Late Antique literature and culture. She received her Ph.D from Bryn Mawr College and is a professor in the History Department at the University of California, Riverside. She is editor and co-editor of several scholarly journals, including Studies in Late Antiquity, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. Her newest book project is The 'Falls' of Rome: The Transformations of Rome in Late Antiquity, 270-565 CE.

February 13, 2020, 11:10 a.m., Murphy Seminar Room

Director’s Discussion with Angela Iannone

Murphy Visiting Theatre Director Angela Iannone will discuss dramatic and literary considerations behind the direction of the play The Persians by Ellen McLaughlin, based on the Greek tragedy The Persians by the playwright Aeschylus. [See February 26 – 29, 2020, for play performance schedule.]

  February 26–29, 2020, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday–Friday, 2:00 p.m. Saturday, Cabe Theatre

The Persians by Ellen McLaughlin (based on the Greek tragedy The Persians by Aeschylus)

Angela Iannone, an award-winning actor, director, educator, and playwright, will direct a student theatrical production of The Persians by Ellen McLaughlin. In this adaptation of Aeschylus' drama, Queen Atossa and her subjects anxiously await news of their King Xerxes' expedition to Greece. Iannone received a BA from Wright State University and an MFA from Illinois State University and has been a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater since 2001. Author of The Edwin Booth Plays—four plays concerning the life and works of American Shakespearean Edwin Booth—she is interested in writing vibrant, intelligent plays that honor creative artists who came before her.

March 5, 2020, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall 

An Evening with Murphy Visiting Playwright Naomi Wallace

For over 20 years Naomi Wallace has pioneered a daring mix of political and mystical imagery in plays that confront the present through a wholly unique magical realism, winning her numerous awards nationally and internationally. Holding degrees from Hampshire College and the University of Iowa, she has taught English literature, poetry, and playwriting at Yale University, UCLA, Vrije University of Amsterdam, and other institutions. She has also worked with women in the criminal justice system and is a member of SURJ, Showing Up for Racial Justice. Currently, she divides her time between Kentucky and the Yorkshire Dales in Northern England.

March 17, 2020, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall

An Evening with Murphy Visiting Writer in Spanish Daína Chaviano

A Havana native and graduate of Universidad de la Habana, Daína Chaviano is recognized as the most important author of science fiction and fantasy in Cuban literature. She is the winner of the acclaimed Azorín Award for Best Novel for El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Man, Woman and Hunger), and her most recent work, La isla de los amores infinitos (The Island of Eternal Love), won several awards and has become the most widely translated Cuban novel of all time, with editions in 25 languages. She resides in Miami, Florida. 

 April 14, 2020, 7:30 p.m., Reves Recital Hall 

An Evening with Murphy Visiting Writer Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is the author of four award-winning novels, Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Exit West. He has also published a number of articles on politics and culture as well as a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilisations. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he moved to the U.S. to attend Princeton University—where he studied creative writing under Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates—and Harvard Law School. His books have been translated into forty languages, featured on best-seller lists, and adapted for the cinema. In 2013, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the world’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers.

April 25, 2019, 4:30 p.m., Murphy Seminar Room
The Aonian/Hendrix-Murphy Literary Contest Winners’ Reception and Reading

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