Sandra Seaton's Biography
The following are links to pages within Sandra Seaton's web site:
About Sandra Seaton | Sally
Hemings | Plays | Performances
|
Reviews
Publications | Archival
Research |
Audio | Links
Sandra Seaton's recent work, From The Diary of Sally Hemings, is
a collaboration with
composer William Bolcom, who set Seaton's text to music. A song cycle, the
work recreates
the thoughts and feelings of Sally Hemings throughout her long relationship with
Thomas
Jefferson by means of fictional diary entries. From The Diary of Sally
Hemings, sung by
mezzo-soprano Florence Quivar, premiered at the Coolidge Auditorium of the
Library of
Congress on March 16, 2001. From The Diary of Sally Hemings was commissioned
by Music
Accord, Inc., a national consortium of presenters including The Boston Symphony
Orchestra at
Tanglewood, The Library of Congress in Washington D.C., San Francisco
Performances, The
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York, the Fortas Chamber Music
Series at
the Kennedy Center, The Ravinia Festival of Highland Park, Illinois, The Krannert
Center at the
University of Illinois in Urbana, and the University Musical Society, University
of Michigan at
Ann Arbor.
Adilah Barnes and Amentha Dymally headed the cast when Sandra Seaton's play The
Bridge
Party played to sold-out houses during a run at Michigan State University in
January 2000.
In this production William Bolcom's piano rags provided musical
background. Ruby Dee
appeared in a 1998 production of The Bridge Party at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor
along with an Equity cast that included Adilah Barnes and Michele Shay.
Sandra Seaton's
plays have been performed in Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New York at Woodie
King's
New Federal Theatre. The Bridge Party, for which Seaton won a
Theodore Ward Prize for
New African American Playwrights, was chosen for inclusion in Strange
Fruit: Plays on
Lynching by American Women, edited by Judy Stephens and Kathy Perkins.
A
Seaton teaches courses in playwriting, fiction writing, and African American
Literature. Her
scholarly work, which has been microfilmed by the Tennessee State Archives,
focuses on
research about African American communities in the South from colonial times
through the
era of segregation.
Sandra Cecelia Seaton was born in Columbia, Tennessee. The stories of
her grandmother,
Emma Louish Evans, and her mother, Hattye Harris, remain an important influence
on
her writing. Grandma Emma also instilled in her granddaughter great pride
in the work
of their relative Flournoy Miller, who wrote the book and starred in Shuffle
Along, a
musical that many believe inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance. She received
her BA
from the University of Illinois, where she studied with John Frederick Nims,
George
Scouffas, and Webster Smalley. At Michigan State University, where she
earned her
MA in Creative Writing, she studied with Robert A. Martin.
For more information on scheduled performances click
here to view the
"Performances" page on this site.