Kia Corthron

Red Bull Theater - New York City's "most exciting classical theater" - offers the 5th volume of collected plays from its popular annual Short New Play Festival. It features sixteen 10-minute plays of heightened language and classical themes by today's hottest writers, from commissions by established playwrights Kia Corthron, Marcus Gardley, and Theresa Rebeck, to winning entries by writers such as Leah Maddrie, Matthew Park, Bridgette Dutta Portman, and Matthew Wells, chosen from a competition that receives nearly 300 submissions each year. In the hands of great playwrights, the 10-minute play is a highly entertaining dramatic form. These delightfully compact works - some downright silly, and others powerfully moving - are from the ninth and tenth years of Red Bull Theater's Short New Play Festival. Dive in and enjoy Authors include: Kate Abbruzzese, Ben Beckley, Kia Corthron, Avery Deutsch, Marcus Gardley, Terry Glaser, Leah Maddrie, Talene Monahan, Matthew Park, Eric Pfeffinger, Bridgette Dutta Portman, Theresa Rebeck, David Lerner Schwartz, Matthew Wells, Mallory Jane Weiss, Sofya Levitsky-Weitz.

Set in the Five Points neighbourhood of New York City in the years 1857-1863, when Americas attitudes towards people of colour and slavery shifted - painfully, transformationally - to the point where a war that began to restore the union becomes one that owes much to black fighting regiments, and common cause grows for the abolition of slavery. We experience the daily life of Five Points through the eyes of Theo, aged 7 at the start of the book and 13 at its close. Theo is half Black and half Irish, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandparents. Through her eyes we se

An exploration of NYC and America in the burgeoning moments before the start of the Civil War through the eyes of a young, biracial girl--the highly anticipated new novel from the winner of the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. "Corthron, a true heir to James Baldwin, presents a startlingly original exposure of the complex roots of American racism." --Naomi Wallace, MacArthur "Genius" Playwriting Fellow and author of One Flea Spare In Moon and the Mars, set in the impoverished Five Points district of New York City in the years 1857-1863, we experience neighborhood life through the eyes of Theo from childhood to adolescence, an orphan living between the homes of her Black and Irish grandmothers. Throughout her formative years, Theo witnesses everything from the creation of tap dance to P. T. Barnum's sensationalist museum to the draft riots that tear NYC asunder, amidst the daily maelstrom of Five Points work, hardship, and camaraderie. Meanwhile, white America's attitudes towards people of color and slavery are shifting--painfully, transformationally--as the nation divides and marches to war. As with her first novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, which was praised by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, among many others, Corthron's use of dialogue brings her characters to life in a way that only an award-winning playwright and scriptwriter can do. As Theo grows and attends school, her language and grammar change, as does her own vocabulary when she's with her Black or Irish families. It's an extraordinary feat and a revelation for the reader. "Moon and the Mars, Corthron's] latest masterpiece, is an absorbing story of family and community, of Africans and Irish, of settler and native, of slavery and abolition, of a city and a nation wracked by Civil War and racist violence, of love won and lost." --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Clarence Major is one of America's literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares. Whether you've known Major's work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major's best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major's importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.

Clarence Major is one of America's literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares. Whether you've known Major's work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major's best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major's importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.

This powerful anthology brings together reflective and raw plays by American playwrights surrounding the psychic and political boundaries of the many faces and shadows of terrorism. Allan Havis’s introduction addresses a variety of terrorism cases from the last 25 years, examines several theories of the root causes of modern terrors, and underscores how theatre forms a unique contour to social and philosophical thought on terrorism. With a foreword from Robert Brustein, the anthology features: Break of Noon by Neil LaBute 7/11 by Kia Corthron Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros Columbinus by PJ Paparelli and Stephen Karam Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them by Christopher Durang

This powerful anthology brings together reflective and raw plays by American playwrights surrounding the psychic and political boundaries of the many faces and shadows of terrorism. Allan Havis’s introduction addresses a variety of terrorism cases from the last 25 years, examines several theories of the root causes of modern terrors, and underscores how theatre forms a unique contour to social and philosophical thought on terrorism. With a foreword from Robert Brustein, the anthology features:Break of Noon by Neil LaBute7/11 by Kia CorthronOmnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-VassilarosColumbinus by PJ Paparelli and Stephen KaramWhy Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them by Christopher Durang

Winner of the Center for Fiction's 2016 First Novel Prize The hotly anticipated first novel by lauded playwright and The Wire TV writer Kia Corthron, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter sweeps American history from 1941 to the twenty-first century through the lives of four men--two white brothers from rural Alabama, and two black brothers from small-town Maryland--whose journey culminates in an explosive and devastating encounter between the two families. On the eve of America's entry into World War II, in a tiny Alabama town, two brothers come of age in the shadow of the local chapter of the Klan, where Randall--a brilliant eighth-grader and the son of a sawmill worker--begins teaching sign language to his eighteen-year-old deaf and uneducated brother B. J. Simultaneously, in small-town Maryland, the sons of a Pullman Porter--gifted six-year-old Eliot and his artistic twelve-year-old brother Dwight--grow up navigating a world expanded both by a visit from civil and labor rights activist A. Philip Randolph and by the legacy of a lynched great-aunt. The four mature into men, directly confronting the fierce resistance to the early civil rights movement, and are all ultimately uprooted. Corthron's ear for dialogue, honed from years of theater work, brings to life all the major concerns and movements of America's past century through the organic growth of her marginalized characters, and embraces a quiet beauty in their everyday existences. Sharing a cultural and literary heritage with the work of Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, and Edward P. Jones, Kia Corthron's The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter is a monumental epic deftly bridging the political and the poetic, and wrought by one of America's most recently recognized treasures.

DramaCharacters: 3 males 2 femalesA Cool Dip offers glimpses into the lives of Abebe a young Ethopian man with a passion for the unlikely combination of Christianity and ecology and the family that houses himduring his college studies in Maryland. Through their interactions the play uncompromisingly tackles the issues of drought and social injustice combining a realistic evocation of human emotion with the fantastical to bring attention to the scarcity of something we so o

A new American play to re-open the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs Breath, Boom is Kia Corthron's first play for the Royal Court Theatre. It is a startling acute portrayal of Prix, a hardened female gang member in New York, whose only escape from her narrow, abusive life is an obsession with creating the perfect fireworks display. The play is based heavily on research into the lives of young women who choose to lead violent lives on the streets. It captures the tough and often poetic language that people who inhabit a world cut off from normal existence use to both mask and portray a perilous existence.