Thursday, October 28, 7pm – Theater
In the Future a Woman Shines Bright – a one person theater presentation on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper featuring Sekai, written by Stephen C. Satell.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the best know African American poet of the nineteenth century as well as an activist in the anti-slavery, equal rights and temperance movements. She published her first book of poetry at the age of 20, her first novel at the age of 67 and published the first short story to be published by an African American in America.
Born in Philadelphia on the first day of spring, the daughter of a noted tenor saxophonist, Sekai was destined to be an artist-activist, a force for good. She began acting at Freedom Theater in 1972 and has performed at the Theater Center of Philadelphia, the Walnut Street Theater, the Adrienne Theater, in Wilmington Delaware at the Christina Theater, the Philadelphia Black Theater Festival and she toured the Philadelphia Schools for the City with her one woman show “Faces of a Women”. Her parallel career as an activist came through her fifteen years, working with two great African American leaders: Father Paul Washington and the creator of the theory of Afrocentricity. Dr. Molefi Kete Asante. She is also a poet and won the Frank Moore Poetry Prize in 2008.
