Tag: Pearl Cleage

A pop-up before pop-ups were cool, Club Zebra featured live readings, music performances, poetry, dance, and everything in between. The audience watched from small cabaret tables and sipped beer and wine purchased via donations since the show had no alcohol license; it was a speakeasy, after all.

One of the ways you can recognize that you have reached elder status is when you discover you can vividly recall events that took place 50 or 60 years ago. These are events that are now seen as having “historic importance,” even though in retrospect they may have seemed less so at the moment you were living through them in real time. That would certainly have been the case for me as a young person heading to Howard University from my home in Detroit.

The Atlanta University Center has shaped generations of leaders—for the nation and for their home city. Atlanta would be nothing like it is today without it.

Tayari Jones—author, professor, and griot of the American South—has a lot on her plate. She teaches a creative writing class at Emory University, she has book blurbs due and forewords to file, and she has words in a just-released craft book, How We Do It, where her Emory colleague Jericho Brown gathered Black writers to explain “how they go about making what they make.” “I know I have a novel,” Jones writes, “when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer.” She is also putting the finishing touches on her fifth and forthcoming novel, Old Fourth Ward, which is set squarely in Black Atlanta’s centers of gravity: the historic neighborhood adjacent to downtown Atlanta (and the book’s namesake) and Cascade Heights (her old stomping grounds).

In 1988, a group of writers gathered on the steps of Spelman College’s Rockefeller Fine Arts building to fete Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, who, that weekend, had become the college’s first Black woman president. We had just gotten out of a wonderful program honoring Dr. Cole and Black women in the arts. People were talking, laughing, and greeting each other . . . Everybody was high off the charge of the whole gathering: This was the culmination of a decades-long discussion of who should lead this historically Black institution, and this was a celebration of the leadership of Black women in many different fields, particularly in scholarship, in literature, and in the arts.

When a mutual friend called to let me know Valerie Boyd had joined the ancestors, I already knew. The night before, I had felt the rush of something irreplaceable leaving us way too soon.

"The truth is that I’m more of a fantasy gardener—in much the same way that I clip complicated, multistep recipes I have no intention of ever actually cooking." Atlanta playwright and poet Pearl Cleage pens this essay on gardening dreams.

Giving women the opportunity to tell their own stories is what connects two generations of artists in Pearl Cleage’s new play, Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous, running March 20 to April 14 at Alliance Theatre.

The best of Atlanta's arts and culture in 2018, including best superstar, painter, museum for local art, improv theater, and more.

The world's largest key lime pie at Lenox Square, spring is back with the Brookhaven Cherry Blossom Festival, and Alliance Theatre showcases two Pearl Cleage one-acts.