Hairston, Andrea

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Hairston, Andrea

PERSONAL:

Education: Smith College, graduate; Brown University, graduate; attended Clarion West science fiction workshop, 1999, and Sapelo Island writing workshop, 2000-01.

ADDRESSES:

Office— Department of Theatre, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, playwright, short-story writer, director, actor, musician, translator, and educator. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany, instructor in African American Women's Theatre, 1995; Smith College, Northampton, MA, currently professor of theatre and Afro-American studies. Chrysalis Theatre, founder and artistic director.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, 2003, for Archangels of Funk(a science fiction play); Older Writer Grant, Speculative Literature Foundation, 2004, for Exploding in Slow Motion(a novel-in-progress); National Endowment for the Arts grant to playwrights; National Endowment for the Arts grant to work with playwright Pearl Cleage; Ford Foundation grant; Rockefeller/NEA grant for new works; and Shubert fellowship for playwriting.

WRITINGS:

Mindscape(novel), Aqueduct Press (Seattle, WA), 2006.

Also author of science fiction plays, including Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, Hummingbird Flying Backward, and Archangels of Funk, which have been produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and public television stations. Translator of plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan. Contributor to anthologies, including So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004;Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, edited by Sheree R. Thomas, 2004; and Daughters of Earth, edited by Justine Larbalestier, Wesleyan Press, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

A prolific theatre director and playwright, Andrea Hairston is a professor of theatre and Afro-American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She is the author of several plays with a science fiction theme, and has seen her dramatic work produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre and the Kennedy Center, and on television and radio. At Smith College, she teaches playwriting and African, Caribbean, German, and African American theatre literature. Hairston is the founder and artistic director of the Chrysalis Theatre, where she has "produced original theatre with music, dance, and masks for over twenty-five years," commented a biographer on the Smith College Web site. She is also the recipient of numerous awards and grants in recognition of her playwriting and directing work. Originally intending to pursue a career in science, Hairston found her passion in the literary and performing arts. "My parents were happy that I didn't starve doing the theatre/artist thing," she mused in an autobiography on the Aqueduct Press Web site.

While teaching at the University of Hamburg in Germany in 1995, Hairston developed an interest in writing science fiction and fantasy novels. "Teaching a semester at a University outside of the United States was an invaluable experience," Hairston stated on the Aqueduct Press Web site. "Home and identity were thrown into sharp focus. I came to appreciate why I loved languages, story-telling, science fiction, and embodied knowledge. A language is the enormous artistic effort of generations of anonymous poets and alchemists seeking to name their world and transform the present into the future of their dreams."

In her debut novel,Mindscape, Hairston envisions a future Earth that has been divided into two distinct political zones by the mysterious extraterrestrial phenomenon called the Barrier. The wall of force is impervious to attempts to breach it, destroy it, or cross it, and it has stood for 115 years. A small handful of individuals have the inexplicable ability to pass back and forth through the Barrier. With the two halves of Earth isolated from each other, tremendous political distrust has arisen, and the zones that have developed in the Barrier's shadow are constantly at war. Now, however, there is hope that peace may soon return to the planet as a treaty, carefully crafted by the dedicated Celestina, is about to be ratified. On the eve of the ratification, however, Celestina is assassinated, throwing the future of the treaty into doubt. Unwilling to let the hope for peace slip away, Celestina's protege Elleni takes up her mentor's cause. Elleni, one of the few able to traverse the Barrier, gathers a diverse group of allies and sets out to continue the struggle for unity on the planet before all hope is extinguished. In her way are power-hungry politicians, mobsters, religious fundamentalists, and the Barrier itself. Library Journal reviewer Jackie Cassada called Mindscape a "panoramic story that is at once personally relevant and philosophically significant."