About the Book
From
the Marrow collects
nine ritual/jazz performance texts by Sharon Bridgforth, including lovve/rituals
& rage, no mo blues, dyke/warrior-prayers, blood pudding, con flama, love
conjure/blues, delta dandi, River See, and dat Black Mermaid
Man Lady/The Show. Rooted in blues and bristling with the voices of
ancestors, lovers, neighbors, aunties, mermaids, and friends, these texts
document a thirty-year practice of deep listening, collaboration, and
care.
Shapeshifting,
polyvocal, multi-gendered, genre-bending, nonlinear, Bridgforth's writing
innovates form the way the ocean carves the coast: with sensuality, salty
humor, aching grief and rage, and with vast, various, and invariable
love. The volume, a historic gathering of Bridgforth's texts, is also a
gathering of longtime collaborators, with witnessings by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sonja Parks, Stacey Karen Robinson, Sonja Perryman, Omi Osun Joni L.
Jones, Nia Witherspoon, Stephanie L. Batiste, and Robbie McCauley.
About the Author:
Sharon Bridgforth(she/her/Mermaid) is a writer that creates ritual/jazz theater. A 2022 winner
of Yale's Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon is a 2020-2023 Playwrights'
Center Core Member, a 2022-2023 McKnight Fellow, and a New Dramatists alum. She
has received support from the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative
Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Her writing is featured
in
Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature;
Mouths
of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, and
Feminist
Studies' special issue commemorating 40 years of
This Bridge
Called My Back and
But Some of Us Are Brave! Sharon's
dat
Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities' PBS
platform.
