On Tuesday, Nov. 5 beginning at 7:30 p.m., the Office of the President presents Aleshea Harris in Auerbach Auditorium of St. Mary’s Hall. The event, “We Do Not Beg the Rope: Poems and Music by Aleshea Harris,” is free of charge and open to the public.
An insistence upon the innate worthiness of marginalized people, “We Do Not Beg the Rope” is a selection of poetic confrontations. Through these works, Harris challenges problematic cultural mythologies while proposing new ones.
Harris’s play “Is God Is” (Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. It will be produced at the Royal Court in London in the summer of 2020 and has been published by 3Hole Press and Samuel French.
“What to Send Up When It Goes Down,” a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed New York City premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine, and was nominated for a Drama Desk award. WTSU will tour to Woolly Mammoth and A.R.T. this fall and has been published by Samuel French.
Harris has performed her own work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Orlando Fringe Festival, REDCAT, as part of La Fête du Livre at La Comèdie de Saint-Étienne, and at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Harris is a two-time MacDowell Fellow.
