From the Director “A story is a medicine that creates and hoists the pulleys, shows us the way out, down, in and around, cuts for us fine wide doors in previously blank walls, doors which lead us to our own knowing.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés There has never been a day that women have not made history. Lorraine Hansberry did that when her autobiographical Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959. She was the first African American woman to produce a piece on Broadway, and A Raisin in the Sun was her story. In this New York Drama Critics award-winning play, she warns that a “dream deferred” will “dry up/like a raisin in the sun.” She died of cancer five years later. Her personal experience of poverty and segregation, reflected in the play, continues to inspire dreams.
National Women’s History Month at Emory in 2006 will honor women like Hansberry, who dare to dream transformative dreams. We will celebrate and affirm women in the arts and the artists they inspire in all of us. Our cast includes actors, authors, playwrights, poets, dancers, painters, patrons of the arts, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, and more.
Inside this issue you’ll meet some women who may transform you, too. Here the written page becomes the canvas on which they tell their stories and share their secrets. These are women who paint their lives from their hearts and souls. They, too, inspire us to have daring adventures, do courageous work, practice freedom of expression, and visualize change.
Join with us now and again in March as we dance for a new tomorrow.  |
