Works in Progress:
Shakespeare as a Starting Point

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize  and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry.  She is a 2022 state awardee of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and received  the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize.  She is the recipient of grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and The Freya Project. A member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, she has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in print, online, and in many journals and anthologies including: Harvard Review, PANK,  Poetry Ireland Review, and Kenyon Review.  She was the 2019-2020 HoCoPoLitSo Writer-in-Residence for Howard County, Maryland, and is the current O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and songwriter Erin Frisby (she/they) has performed at Carnegie Hall, historic punk venue 924 Gilman Street, as part of Tino Sehgal’s “This, You” at the Hirshhorn, Fort Reno, and everywhere in between. Early in their career, they were honored as a three-time Rosa Ponselle Silver Rose awardee for opera performance and participated as a soloist in the Amalfi Coast Festival while completing their vocal performance degree at University of Maryland.

Erin has written music for, performed with, and toured with The OSYX. Releasing “One of the best heavy records of the year” according to music journalist Jim DeRogatis of Sound Opinions, The OSYX burst onto the D.C. music scene with a refreshing energy featured at The Smithsonian Social Power of Music and by Curve Magazine. Previously Erin toured the country frequently with FuzzQueen and Miss Shevaughn & Yuma Wray. Erin currently plays with new power trio, Ammonite, which will be featured in performance by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in February, 2023.

An accomplished teaching artist, Erin developed in-school music education programming for under resourced public schools in Chicago as the Program Director of Rock For Kids (now Foundations of Music). Erin’s curriculum was piloted for 30 students in 3^rd and 4^th grade and grew to serve 7,000 students at 25 schools. Erin has created and led interactive music workshops at The Smithsonian Luce Center and 7 Drum City. And most recently piloted a yearlong skill sharing cohort for DIY music artists through This Could Go Boom!.  Erin is a co-founder of  This Could Go Boom!, which is a nonprofit record label and organization leveraging resources and facilitating community collaboration, to champion gender identities that have been systematically marginalized in all aspects of the music business. Erin has presented a Hirshhorn Gallery Talk as well as a Kennedy Center Millennium Stage talk as a representative of TCGB!. The organization has been featured in Alternative Press, The Washington Post, and as part of the Smithsonian Folkways Festival. TCGB! has released three full length albums and an EP and has presented 125 musical acts in paid performance. TCGB! is a recipient of a Maryland Creativity Grant.

Erin has recently received funding as an individual artist from the PG County Arts and Humanities Council as well as the Maryland State Arts Council to create new musical works. Both pieces included creative community collaboration with participants of all ages and experience levels. Erin completed intensive arts activism training from The Sanctuaries D.C. Arts For Social Impact program.

Caleen Sinnetee Jennings is an actor, director, playwright, and a founding member of The Welders, a D.C. Playwrights’ Collective. Dramatic Publishing Company has published eight of her plays, and her work has appeared in seven play anthologies. Caleen has received play writing awards from the Kennedy Center and The Actor’s Theatre of Louisville.  In April 2022, her play Queens Girl in the World had an off-Broadway run.  The other two plays in her Queens Girl Trilogy (Queens Girl in Africa and Queens Girl: Black in the Green Mountains) have been performed at Mosaic Theatre in Washington D.C. and at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, M.D.  Arena Stage commissioned her to write monologues for two pandemic-related Zoom plays: May 22, 2020 and The 51st State.  She wrote the final episode for Round House Theatre’s zoom series, Homebound.  She was commissioned by the Kennedy Center to write a stage adaptation of Walter Dean Myers’ novel, Darius & Twig, which was produced at the Kennedy Center Family Theatre and did a national tour.  She is currently writing the book for a new musical on the life of famous black contralto Marian Anderson and working on a commission from Arena Stage.  Caleen is Professor Emerita of Theatre in the Department of Performing Arts at American University in Washington, D.C. where she taught playwriting, among many other theatre courses, for 31 years.  She has been a workshop teacher for Kennedy Center’s Playwright’s Intensive for over 20 years, and she has been a faculty member for the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute for 28 years. Jennings has her B.A. in Drama from Bennington College, and her M.F.A. in Acting from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Kim Roberts is the editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), selected by the East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program as the book that “best illuminates important aspects” of the culture of Washington, DC. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018), and five books of poems, most recently The Scientific Method (WordTech Editions, 2017). Her chapbook, Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere, is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2023. http://www.kimroberts.org