I’m both a playwright and a committed teaching artist. As a playwright, I create worlds that exist in specific eras. My plays are not "historical dramas" but human dramas in which I examine when a particular idea that we consider self-evident today sprouted into public consciousness. In “Fast Blood” which takes place in 1845, Effie, the main character who is born into slavery has a brand new idea when she says “I been thinking… what if a child wasn’t meant to be sired like so much chattel. Maybe women ain’t just fertile ground for some master’s seed. Maybe babies should be wanted. Maybe they should be growed out of love”. In 1845 Effie was prescient, thinking thoughts no one dared to. Of course, it is natural for us today to understand that all babies black or white should be considered human. But in that system of terror, whole swaths of people dared not think so. That’s what I try to show in my work. I look at what the world was like before an idea that we take for granted today took hold, and the implications of that ideas’ adoption-- personal, social, and political. In "Slashes of Light", which takes place in 1967-68, the teenaged characters are encountering worlds of ideas there was no language for. In my teaching, I try to engender the same empathy in my students. In The American Slavery Project’s “Unheard Voices” which I conceived and wrote a monologue for, we look at the burials at the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan and imagine the lives of the people where. In the educational high school lab that accompanies the show, we teach looking at and voicing the world through the eyes of people who, perhaps didn’t have a voice in their own life.