Join us for a lively and wide-ranging conversation about Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 with Harvard scholars Ju Yon Kim, Tracy K. Smith, and Timothy Patrick McCarthy, who will reflect on this theatrical landmark, its newly revised ensemble production at the A.R.T., and what has happened in this country since its premiere in Los Angeles nearly three decades ago.
A.R.T.’s Civically Speaking series features virtual conversations, lectures, and performance events on history, politics, justice, and the meaning of democracy.
Ju Yon Kim is Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English and Chair of the Concentration in Theater, Dance & Media at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American literature and performance; modern and contemporary American theater and drama; and cross-racial and intercultural performance. She is the author of The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (NYU Press, 2015), which received the 2016 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association for best book in American studies published in 2015 by a New England area scholar.
Tracy K. Smith is Professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011), and served two terms as poet laureate of the United States (2017 – 2019), during which time she traveled across America, hosting poetry readings and conversations in rural communities.
Timothy Patrick McCarthy is an award-winning scholar, educator, and activist who has taught at Harvard for more than two decades. At the Graduate School of Education, he is Core Faculty in the Equity and Opportunity Foundations Curriculum, the Education Leadership, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship Program (ELOE), and the new online Master’s program in Education Leadership. At the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the first openly gay/
