Emerging Voices Project Highlights UB's Writers - Students, Faculty and Alumni
April 19, 2016
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
The Emerging Voices Project, a source for enriching the Baltimore arts scene by introducing local writers and students as they unveil creative projects and receive feedback from a live audience, returns to the University of Baltimore campus starting May 5.
Spotlight UB, the University's live performance series, has played host to EVP since 2010, is an annual series in which local writers and students unveil creative projects and receive feedback from a live audience. Emerging Voices performances will continue until to June 24. All EVP events will take place in the Wright Theater in the UB Student Center, 21 W. Mt. Royal Ave. All Emerging Voices events are free and open to the public.
This year, EVP will begin with a showcase of student storytellers who spent the spring semester learning the craft from local memoirist Marion Winik, associate professor in UB's Klein Family School of Communications Design. Winik, the author of several books of creative non-fiction and a columnist for Baltimore Fishbowl, taught the craft of storytelling to a lively class of undergraduate and graduate students and honed their ability to derive meaningful narratives from their experiences and share their stories publicly. On Thursday, May 5 at 6 p.m., each student will take the stage to tell one of their stories, whose subjects include confrontations with bullies, a date that goes the "best kind of wrong," and an "illicit candy empire."
On May 12 at 6:30 p.m., this year's editorial staff of Skelter—one of two literary journals at the University of Baltimore, and exclusively featuring the writing of the UB community, including students, faculty, staff, and alumni—will release its 2016 issue with a reading and party. Skelter is staffed by undergraduate students who review and publish submissions of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Because the process of publishing Skelter is built into an annual class, the editorial staff is different every year, promising a fresh take on every issue. Copies of Skelter will be on sale during the May 12 event.
Jon Shorr, associate professor in UB's Klein Family School of Communications Design, will present his multimedia story Adaptations on May 19 at 7 p.m. Shorr, the director of the Interdisciplinary Studies program and a teacher of English and media production classes at the University of Baltimore since 1983, is also an experienced producer, director, writer and host of numerous television and radio series. His original play, Good God!, was featured as a part of EVP 2013. His radio play, The Bind of Isaac, was featured in 2010, EVP's inaugural year.
UB alumna, playwright, and EVP all-star Latonia Valincia Moss will be featured on Thursday, May 26, at 7 p.m., where a staged reading of her new play, Impossible Love, will be performed as a staged reading. Moss graduated from UB's MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program, and has had three of her plays, which focus on the African-American female experience, staged at EVP.
Sharea Harris, a new graduate from the MFA Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program, will present her stage play Black Maggies, about a young woman who follows her matriarchal line into a supernatural underground of women, on June 2 at 7 p.m. A poet, Harris developed Black Maggies during a playwriting workshop at UB last spring.
Spotlight UB will combine forces with Rapid Lemon productions and the Baltimore Playwrights Festival to present a staged reading of The Room Where I Was Held, a new play by David Zax about a journalist who returns home after being abducted by the Taliban. Zax, a journalist who has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, studied playwriting at NYU, where The Room Where I Was Held won the Goldberg Prize for best student play. Two readings will be held on June 11 and June 24, both at 7 p.m., after a series of playwright revisions. Rapid Lemon productions is a Baltimore-based theater group that performs new and original stage plays, and the Baltimore Playwrights Festival has been staging unproduced scripts from Baltimore and DC-area playwrights every summer from June through August for 35 years.
Finally, on June 16 at 7 p.m., the Dramatists Guild and Spotlight UB will present a staged reading of Still Point by Mark Scharf, about the aftermath when half of a popular country-western duo suddenly leaves behind the fame and fortune. Scharf is an actor and teacher as well as a playwright; his work has been performed in major U.S. cities, on college campuses, and internationally. He is currently the playwright-in-residence for Theatre Virginia's New Voices Program. The Dramatists Guild is a professional association that advances the interests of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists. Again, Spotlight UB partners with Dramatists Guild representative Brent Englar, who will lead workshops for students in Prof. Jeffrey Hoover's Business of Being an Artist class this fall.
Learn more about Spotlight UB. For more information about individual events, send an email to spotlightub@ubalt.edu.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the College of Public Affairs, the Merrick School of Business, the UB School of Law and the Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences.