Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan's Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
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Ashley Lucas is Professor of Theatre & Drama, the Residential College, the Penny Stamps School of Art & Design, and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan (UM). For six years, she also served as Director of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) and is currently one of the faculty leads on a large-scale humanities archival project called Documenting Criminalization and Confinement. She holds a B.A. in Theater Studies and English from Yale University and a joint Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies and Theatre and Drama from the University of California, San Diego. She is a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Faculty Engaged Scholars Program, UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities, and UM’s Institute for the Humanities. Her research and teaching interests include U.S. Latina/o theatre, prison theatre, theatre for social change, and related topics in acting, playwriting, and comparative ethnic studies. Lucas is also the author of an ethnographic play about the families of prisoners entitled Doin’ Time: Through the Visiting Glass, which she has performed as a one-woman show throughout the U.S. and in Ireland, Brazil, and Canada. Her forthcoming book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, Sept. 2020) examines the ways in which incarcerated people use theatre to counteract the dehumanizing forces of the prison.
Phil Christman is the author of Midwest Futures, winner of both the Independent Publisher Book Award and a Midwest Independent Publisher Award. He currently lectures in the English department at University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Hedgehog Review , Commonweal , The Christian Century , The Outline , and other places. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI.