Jesmyn Ward - Opening Nights

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

JESMYN WARD

MARCH 18, 2024

CHANGING THE LIVES THAT CHANGE THE WORLD

Carlos

PLATINUM

GOLD

ERIC

SILVER

MIKEY

BRONZE

WELCOME FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR

Greetings and welcome to the continuation of the 2023–24 Opening Nights at Florida State University Season Offerings. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to monitor the remaining programs for this season while wrapping up the curation of those events that will welcome you in 2024–25.

The Opening Nights staff is solid and working diligently to make certain that your expectations from our performances are met with the highest quality of deliverance.

Recently, Opening Nights sponsored Pink Martini with China Forbes. To say that it was a high energy evening would be a gross understatement. Gus Corbella, the former Chair of the Opening Nights Development Council received a hand-written note from an audience member lauding the concert from the opening notes to the finale which led to a conga line through the aisles of Ruby Diamond Concert Hall. In fact, the line was so long that once it had made its initial loop, it met the end of the line coming towards it. A “head-on conga collision” if you will. The

note indicated that the gentleman had been waiting years to see Pink Martini live, to the point that he drove from Central Florida for the evening. Gus, appropriately sent the note to the entirety of the Development Council with the header “Why We Do What We Do!”

The above couldn’t be better summarized. In essence, why we do what we do is that it’s part of both our personal and professional DNA.

My hope is that why we’re doing what we’re doing is satisfying your value in the live performing arts as a means of communicating cultural riches and offerings in a world that so desperately needs them now.

From my heart, it’s an honor to be back with you.

Warmly,

Michael Blachly Interim Director, Opening Nights

THEATRE TCC! 2023-24 SEASON COME JOURNEY WITH US!

Something Wicked This Way Comes

By Ray Bradbury

When the carnival comes to town, two boys unearth the terrifying and horrible secrets that lurk within Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and learn the consequences of wishes, as a sinister and evil force is at work in Green Town, Illinois.

October 12-14 at 8 p.m.

October 20 & 21 at 8 p.m.

October 22 at 2 p.m.

The Shape of Things

By Neil Labute

A young student drifts into an ever-changing relationship with an art major while his best friend’s engagement crumbles, unleashing a drama that peels back the skin of two modern-day relationships.

November 16-18 at 8 p.m.

December 1 & 2 at 8 p.m.

December 3 at 2 p.m.

Legally Blonde

Book by Heather Hach

Music and Lyrics By Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin

The ultimate tribute to girl power, Legally Blonde will take you from the UCLA sorority house to the Harvard halls of justice with the timely coming-of-age story of Broadway’s brightest heroine.

April 4-6 at 8 p.m.

April 12 & 13 at 8 p.m.

April 14 at 2 p.m.

Florida State University

Richard McCullough President

Opening Nights Staff

Michael Blachly Interim Director

Allison Jordan Development Director

Grace Atkins Program & Operations Manager

Brad Lister Business & Patron Services Manager

Calla MacNamara Education & Engagement Manager

Noelle Enright Marketing & Communications Associate

Amanda Cole

Senior Marketing Designer, University Marketing

Rodney H. Johnson Director of Digital Design & UX, University Marketing

Opening Nights Development Council

Eric Friall, Chair

Ron Sachs, Vice Chair

Gus Corbella, Immediate-Past Chair

Susan Stratton, Secretary

Kathleen Daly

Brooke Hallock

Heather Mitchell

Nan Nagy

Tom Nelson

Florida State University Partners

Office of the President

College of Fine Arts

College of Music

English Department

Challenger Learning Center

FAMU-FSU College of Engineering

University Relations

University Communications

UPCOMING PERFORMANCES

MARCH

18 Jesmyn Ward Author

21 Damn Tall Buildings Bluegrass

APRIL

5 Terence Blanchard featuring The E-Collective & Turtle Island Quartet Jazz

6 Dinosaur World Live! Family, Educational

18 Chain of Parks Art Festival

Presenting Artist Dean Mitchell Visual Art

27 Rising Appalachia Rock, Blues

MAY

1 Indigo Girls Rock

Cover photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Opening Nights, Opening Doors is a partner program of Prime Meridian Bank, FSU Opening Nights, and the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Big Bend. Now in its third year, the program provides on-campus experiences for Club members to inspire a vision of future opportunities in the areas of engineering, nursing, hospitality, and (coming soon) media and the arts.

Herb & Mary Jervis

Congratulations Opening Nights for fostering the Arts in Tallahassee for the past 26 years.

The students, faculty, and staff of FSU and the citizens of north Florida have been enriched by your efforts.

We eagerly await what the next 26 years will bring.

2023–24 MEMBERS

Producer’s Circle

Bart & Tamara Aitken ✽

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Dr. Jayne M. Standley H

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David Waters

Partner Level

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American Endowment Foundation

Anonymous

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Berneice Cox u

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William Donnellan H

Grossman Furlow & Bayo H

ON Member for 15+ years

H Member for 10+ years

✽ Member for 5+ years

u First year members

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Friend Level

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David & Linda Knopf

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AS OF 2/20/24

Jimmy Martin & Carlos Fernandez

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Evan & Heather Rosenberg u

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Lynda Roser & Marilyn Yon

April Salter & Christopher Fagiano u

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Associate Level

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Dr. Lynne Y. Lummel & Dr. John W. Lee u

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Debut Level

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Dan & Ash Barrow u

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Keith & Julie Campbell u

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Sue Colombo u

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Signature Art Gallery

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Ron

2023–24 members, cont.

Nicholas Stratis

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Solo Level

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ON Member for 15+ years

H Member for 10+ years

✽ Member for 5+ years

u First year members

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Shane & Nia Wellendorf u

Joyce Murray & Pam Whitworth u

Glenn Woodsum, DJ Wright

Carole Wright Brogdon

For more information & to become a member, visit openingnights.fsu.edu/support/ membership or contact Allison Jordan, Director of Development at 850.778.7139 or allison. jordan@fsu.edu.

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Sally Karioth & Amanda Karioth Thompson thank Opening Nights for their commitment to the arts in our community

Ken Kato & Nan Nagy

Proud Supporters of Opening Nights

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

MONDAY, MARCH 18

Opperman Music Hall • 7:30 PM

Jesmyn Ward

In Collaboration with FSU Department of English

MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward has been hailed as the standout writer of her generation, proving her “fearless and toughly lyrical” voice in novels, memoir, and nonfiction. Betsy Burton of the American Booksellers Association has called her “the new Toni Morrison.” In 2017, she became the first woman and the first person of color to win two National Book Awards for Fiction—joining the ranks of William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Philip Roth, and John Updike.

Continued on pg. 19

The historic winner—first woman and first Black American— of two National Book Awards for Fiction

Jesmyn Ward

Continued from pg. 17

Ward’s first historical novel, the instant New York Times best seller Let Us Descend, tells the astonishing story of Annis, an enslaved teenage girl who is sold by her white father after being separated from her mother.

Let Us Descend incorporates elements of Dante’s Inferno, magical realism, and slave narratives. It is a book about grief, resilience, imagination, and kinship, and stitches the Black American experience into the very land, exploring what lies beyond this world: in our lived experiences and after our deaths. The book was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Fiction.

Ward’s stories are largely set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, where she grew up and still lives. When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Ward was forced to evacuate her rapidly flooding home. Her writing is deeply informed by the trauma of Katrina, not to mention its unimaginable social and economic repercussions. Her novel Salvage the Bones, winner of the 2011 National Book Award, is a troubling but ultimately empowering tale of familial bonds set amid the chaos of the hurricane. Likewise, Ward’s debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, depicts what Publishers Weekly calls “a world full of despair but not devoid of hope” in the aftermath of natural disaster.

A singular Southern odyssey that strikes at the heart of life in the rural South, Sing, Unburied, Sing, earned Ward a second National Book Award in 2017. Sing, Unburied, Sing is a road novel through Mississippi’s past and present that explores the bonds of a family tested by racism and poverty. Margaret Atwood called it a “wrenching new novel… [that] digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. A must!” Sing was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times and Time The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly also called Sing

one of the year’s best books, and the novel nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped, delves into the five years of Ward’s life in which she lost five young men—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that follows poor people and people of color. Lauded by Kirkus Reviews as a “modern rejoinder to Black Like Me [and] Beloved,” Men We Reaped is a beautiful and painful homage to Ward’s ghosts and the haunted yet hopeful place she calls home. Men We Reaped won the Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

She is the also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, which NPR named one of the Best Books of 2016. Taking James Baldwin’s 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point, this groundbreaking collection features essays and poems about race from the most important voices of our time—including Edwidge Danticat, Natasha Trethewey, Isabel Wilkerson, Mitchell S. Jackson, Kiese Laymon, and Claudia Rankine. In her talks, Ward shares her writing process and how her experiences growing up poor and Black in the South continue to influence her work. Ward’s book, Navigate Your Stars, is an adaptation of her 2018 Tulane University Commencement speech that champions the value of hard work and the importance of respect for oneself and others. As she said in her acceptance speech at the 2011 National Book Awards, “I understood that I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor, and the Black and the rural people of the South, so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important, as theirs.”

Ward is a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans where she teaches creative

PERINATAL

Dr. Adanna Amanze

Jonathan Brantley

Janet R. Thornton

writing. In 2016, she won the Strauss Living award, given every five years by the American Academy of Arts & Letters for literary excellence. In 2017, she was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant for her work “exploring the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African-Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.” In 2018, she was recognized among Time‘s 100 Most Influential People, and she is the winner of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

Ward received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood Awards for her fiction, essays, and drama. She held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and served as the Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. A contributing editor for Vanity Fair, she is at work on two additional new books: a novel for adults set in New Orleans at the height of the American slave trade, and a young adult novel about a Black girl from the South with supernatural powers.

UPCOMING PERFORMANCES

MARCH

21 Damn Tall Buildings Bluegrass

APRIL

5 Terence Blanchard featuring The E-Collective and Turtle Island Quartet Jazz

6 Dinosaur World Live! Family, Educational

18 Chain of Parks Art Festival Presenting Artist Dean Mitchell Visual Art

27 Rising Appalachia Rock, Blues

MAY

1 Indigo Girls Rock

Dinosaur World Live!

Dean Mitchell

Rising Appalachia

Damn Tall Buildings

Terence Blanchard

Law Office of Linda P. Bailey, P.A.

Gus

Berger Singerman proudly supports Florida State University's Opening Nights and its efforts in bolstering arts education within the Tallahassee community