Alexander Street: Literature, Drama, and Performing Arts

Society vs. Woman: Two Fearless Females

            Alexander Street Press is very excited to have acquired two daring and distinctive works from two very important black women writers. Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1984), the autobiographical work by the Trinidadian born, Bronx-raised poet-radical, traces the early life experiences that shaped the voice of a plain speaker of often uncomfortable truths who would transform the challenges of being a black lesbian into some of the earliest resistance-and-illumination literature of its kind.
            Without a Name and Under the Tongue (1994) is a double-novella by Yvonne Vera who was raised in early post-independence Zimbabwe.  Her poetic approach to dauntingly harsh content garnered the 2004 Swedish PEN Tucholsky Prize "for a corpus of works dealing with taboo subjects.” In these works she speaks of the tenuous position of women in a traditional culture undergoing rapid transformation.

A wealth of August Wilson documentary material.

Our Theatre in Video collection now contains three documentaries on playwright August Wilson. Wilson was arguably the most influential African American playwright of the 20th century. Each of these documentaries offers a unique perspective on Wilson's life, his influences, and his work. In his own words, he explains how influential blues music was to shaping his voice as a writer. He will be missed on the landscape of contemporary American theatre. These interviews offer insight into why.