a.k. payne's Bio:

a.k. payne (she/they) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. Their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. She is the current recipient of the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency, the Kemp Powers Commission Fund for Black Playwrights and Atlantic Theater Company's Judith Champion Launch Commission. Their work has been developed with the National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club's "Groundworks Lab." Their play AMANI had its World Premiere with National Black Theatre and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in early 2023. Their play Furlough's Paradise will have its World Premiere at Alliance Theatre in early 2024. They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade; a queer & non-binary abolitionist affected in community by the ‘New Jim Crow;” and of a great lineage of Black women storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker.

Pearl Cleage's Bio:

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer who is currently Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre. A graduate of Spelman College, she also serves as Atlanta's first Poet Laureate. She is a frequently produced playwright whose dramatic work includes Flyin' West, Blues for an Alabama Sky, A Song for Coretta and Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous. Her newest play, Something Moving: A Meditation on Maynard, was commissioned by Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. and will premiere there this Fall before returning to Atlanta in 2024. She is also the bestselling author of eight novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, a memoir and the praise poem We Speak Your Names, commissioned by Oprah Winfrey and written with her husband and frequent collaborator, Zaron W. Burnett, Jr.