Andrea Hairston
Excerpt:
Pittsburgh 1987. The Monongahela Playhouse squatted on the river banks, an ancient shipwreck wheezing in a snow squall. Wind tore at banners announcing the final shows of the season. Inside was cold and damp. Cinnamon shivered as evaporating sweat stole her heat and floated toward the gallery. Artists had rescued the old waste processing plant before Cinnamon was born, but they couldn’t raise enough money to fix the rambling wreck properly. Hasty renovations threatened collapse. The Monongahela River ate at the foundation. The Playhouse creaked and groaned melodramatically in every storm and smelled of sewage and backwater, especially in summer. In winter it was too drafty for foul smells to linger. Recent budget cuts meant the jacked up, inefficient furnace was set just above where the pipes froze. Stage lights and the audience kept actors warm. Everyone else (like young hopefuls trying out for the New Play Festival) stayed in coats and gloves. Cinnamon’s jacket was soaking wet. She’d hung it by a radiator, willing it to dry out before she went home. Always a stupid optimist, even fourteen going on fifteen. Why else was she trying out for this no-name musical?--From "Will Do Magic For Small Change," a current project.
Bio:
Andrea Hairston was a math/physics major in college until she did special effects for a show and then she ran off to the theatre and became an artist. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and television. She has translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English. Ms. Hairston has received many playwriting and directing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, an NEA grant to work as dramaturge/director with playwright Pearl Cleage, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting.Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, Hummingbird Flying Backward, and Dispatches have been science fiction plays. Archangels of Funk, a sci-fi theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003.A Clarion West 1999 graduate, Ms. Hairston's first novel, Mindscape, was published by Aqueduct Press in March 2006. Mindscape recently won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick Award and the Tiptree Award.In March 2011, she received the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for distinguished contributions to the scholarship and criticism of the fantastic.
Publications:
Redwood and Wildfire, published by Aqueduct Press, February 2011.Mindscape, published by Aqueduct Press, 2006."Griots of the Galaxy," a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan.Published essays include: “Octavia Butler—Praise Song to a Prophetic Artist,” in Daughters of Earth, ed. by Justine Larbalestier; “Stories Are More Important Than Facts: Imagination as Resistance in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth” in Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp; “Romance of the Robot: From RUR & Metropolis to WALL-E” in The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 4, ed. by Sylvia Kelso; “Lord of the Monsters—Minstrelsy Redux: King Kong, Hip Hop, and the Brutal Black Buck,” in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts; “Driving Mr. Lenny,” article for The International Review of Science Fiction.
Writing Description:
I write to discover the world and who I might become.
Writing Goals:
I will write 3500 words a week. I have to get my third book in shape!
Fundraising Goals:
I hope to raise as much as people can give!
Website:
andreahairston.com
