Black History Month Events Announced at The Sheen Center

The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture continues its celebration of Black History Month with three special events featuring some the preeminent Black writers, artists and activists of our time. Tickets/reservations are available online at SheenCenter.org, by phone at 212-925-2812, or in-person at The Sheen Center box office.

RACE IN AMERICA: TELLING OUR STORIES
A CONVERSATION WITH SAPPHIRE, MAJOR JACKSON, AND Patrick Phillips
Tuesday, February 20 at 7:30PM in The Loreto Theater
Stories can be drivers of real change during these times of racial tension. A conversation with readings by author Sapphire (Push), poet and professor Major Jackson (Hoops), and poet and author Patrick Phillips (Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America). Moderated by Obie-winning producer Kelley Nicole Girod(Fire This Time Festival). Tickets: $25

LITTLE ROCK
PLAY READING AND PANEL DISCUSSION EVENT
Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 3PM and 7:30PM in The Loreto Theater
This play by Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj tells the story of nine brave students who wanted a better education at a white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas at the dawn of the civil rights movement in 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Little Rock became ground zero in the fight to integrate public schools across America. With the aid of an emerging technology called television, the world met a brave and stalwart group of black teenagers who would become known as The Little Rock Nine, along with a supporting cast including a defiant Governor, a resolute President, and 11,000 federal troops.

Directed by the playwright and produced by Rebel Theatrical Management, LLC, this reading is a special preview of the play prior to the full production in the Loreto Theater this spring. The matinee will feature a post-performance panel discussion about this seminal chapter in American history with panelists including Carlotta Walls LaNier, one of the Little Rock Nine. Tickets are free. RSVP required. A donation of $20 at the door to benefit the Little Rock Nine Foundation is suggested.

JACKIE ROBINSON: THE FAITH BEHIND THE LEGEND
AUTHOR'S NIGHT WITH ED HENRY
Tuesday, February 27 at 7:30PM in The Black Box Theater
The Sheen Center welcomes Ed Henry, Fox News Channel's chief national correspondent and author of the New York Times bestseller 42 Faith: The Rest of the Jackie Robinson Story. For the first time, Henry's book reveals in full the backstory of faith that guided Robinson into not only the baseball record books but the annals of civil rights as well. Learn about a side of Robinson's humanity that few have taken the time to see. Henry will sit down with Fox News political analyst Juan Williams to discuss the book celebrating the Jackie Robinson legacy. Ed Henry will sign copies of his book after the presentation. Tickets: $10

The Sheen Center for Thought & Culture is a forum to showcase works highlighting the true, the good, and the beautiful. Located downtown on historic Bleecker Street, the Sheen Center is a vibrant new arts organization that focuses on theater, music, film, and talk. A project of the Archdiocese of New York, the state-of-the-art complex encompasses the 270-seat Loreto Theatre, equipped with five-camera high-definition TV and live-stream capability and a multi-track recording studio; the 80-seat Black Box Theatre; four rehearsal studios; and an art gallery. It was named after the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, best known for his popular, inspirational radio and TV ministry in the 1950s and 60s.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KELLEY NICOLE GIROD is the founder and Executive Producing Director of Obie Award winning, The Fire This Time Festival. She is a 2008 graduate of Columbia's MFA playwriting program where she was a Stein and Liberace Fellow, as well as a John Golden Fellow. She was named Nytheatre.com Person of the Year for her work on The Fire This Time Festival, and is a part of the Indie Theatre Hall of Fame. As a producer her credits include Israela Margalit's Get Me A Guy, and Night Blooming Jasmine (both at Horse Trade Theater); Louisiana Mon Amour (Women Center Stage at Culture Project); Thais Francis's Outcry (Horse Trade Theater, Jack). She is a mother to two beautiful daughters, Penelope Evelyn and Noelle Anamaria.

ED HENRY serves as Fox News Channel's chief White House correspondent. He joined the network in June 2011. Throughout his tenure at FNC, Henry has covered all major news stories involving President Obama and his administration. Henry has won numerous journalism honors, including the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress and the White House Correspondents Association's Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential coverage under deadline pressure in 2008.Henry also served in the prestigious post of president of the White House Correspondents' Association from 2012-2013, after being elected in an unopposed election by his peers in the White House press corps. Prior to joining FNC, Henry was at CNN from 2004-2011, where he served as the network's senior White House correspondent and a congressional correspondent. Henry began his career working for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jack Anderson and later joined the newspaper Roll Call as a reporter, where he rose to senior editor. He graduated from Siena College with a B.A. in English.

MAJOR JACKSON is the author of four collections of poetry: Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers; Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.

Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj is an Indo-Afro-Caribbean American artist, educator and activist. Maharaj has authored several plays, including Little Rock (2015 Barrymore Award), Daisy, Grey and Twenty-Five, Hansberry/Baldwin (Semi-Finalist for the Eugene O'Neil Playwright Festival.) Commissioned Work: Diss Diss and Dis Dat, Grey and Twenty-Five, Black Footnotes, Children of the Dream. He is the former Artistic Director of New Freedom Theatre in Philadelphia and has held artistic residencies with ALLIANCE THEATRE, Kennedy Center, Crossroads Theatre, and Arkansas Repertory Theatre. Maharaj is an alumnus of Lincoln Center Directors Lab and TCG Young Leaders of Color in the American Theater.

Patrick Phillips is the author of a book of nonfiction, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton 2016), and three poetry collections. His most recent, Elegy for a Broken Machine, was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry; his two earlier collections are Boy and Chattahoochee. He is also the translator of When We Leave Each Other: Selected Poems of Henrik Nordbrandt. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Phillips' work has appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, and The Nation, and his honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. Phillips lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Drew University.

SAPPHIRE is the author of two bestselling novels, Push and The Kid. Push was made into the Academy Award-winning major motion picture Precious, and the film adaptation received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress. Sapphire's work has been translated into thirteen languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in The Black Scholar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Teacher's Voice, The New Yorker, Spin, and Bomb.