Author Description

<p>Trained<br> in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip <br>hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa <br>Davis's plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of <br>music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift--for us, of course, and for Davis's aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, <br> Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under <br>racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the <br>grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and <br>white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal <br>virtuosity of Davis's writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice <br>warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist <br>concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error<br> is a necessary instrument--maybe the sounding weight.</p>