From the Marrow Vol. 1 collects five ritual/jazz performance texts by Sharon Bridgforth, including lovve/rituals & rage, no mo blues, dyke/warrior-prayers, blood pudding, and con flama. Rooted in blues and bristling with the voices of ancestors, lovers, aunties, neighbors, and friends, these texts document the first decade of Bridgforth’s thirty-year practice, including the founding of The root wy’mn Theatre Company. Shapeshifting, polyvocal, multi-gendered, genre-bending, nonlinear, Bridgforth’s writing innovates form the way the ocean carves the coast: with sensuality, salty humor, aching grief and rage, and with vast, various, and invariable love. This volume—the first of two—includes essays, interviews, and witnessings by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sonja Parks, Stacey Karen Robinson, Sonja Perryman, and Robbie McCauley.
Author Biography:
Sharon Bridgforth (she/her/Mermaid) is a writer that creates ritual/jazz theater. A 2022 winner of Yale’s Windham Campbell Prize in Drama, Sharon is a 2020-2023 Playwrights’ Center Core Member, a 2022-2023 McKnight Fellow, and a New Dramatists alum. She has received support from the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, Creative Capital, MAP Fund and the National Performance Network. Her writing is featured in Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature; Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, and Feminist Studies’ special issue commemorating 40 years of This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave! Sharon’s dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/The Show is streaming on the Twin Cities’ PBS platform.
