Some days feel like they will never end. After a morning that includes a cancer scare and kicking her girlfriend out of the house, Octavia decides to have a last turn up with her best friends. In poet Aziza Barnes’s ingenious portrait of a day in the life of four young black women in New York City, BLKS explores the joy and anguish of growing up and out. Riotously funny and magically rendered, Barnes’s playwriting debut marks the arrival of a truly original contemporary American voice.
Winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize, Aziza Barnes’s first full length collection, i be but i ain’t is from YesYes Books, 2016. They are a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival and co-host of the podcast, The Poetry Gods. Barnes is a graduate of New York University and participant in the 2016 Ojai Playwrights Conference.
Named in American Theatre Magazine’s “One to Watch”, Nataki Garrett is the Associate Artistic Director of Denver Center for the Performing Arts, a Company Member at Woolly Mammoth, and co-Artistic Director of BLANK THE DOG PRODUCTIONS (BTD). Most recently for BTD she directed Carolyn Bryant, which focuses on the decades-long silence of the woman for whom Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955. Garrettdirected An Octaroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Woolly Mammoth, which will be remounted this July.