Toni Morrison wrote, “a literate slave is supposed to be a contradiction in terms.” Adeola Solanke’s original new play, Phillis in London, dramatizes and re-imagines 1773 journey to London of enslaved prodigy and poet, Phillis Wheatley. It marks next year’s 250th anniversary of her landmark poetry collection - the first publication by an African-American in English - Reflections on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral, which was published in London the same year. The books were brought over to Boston aboard the vessel Dartmouth - one of the three tea ships involved in the Boston Tea Party.
Wheatley was ‘celebrated’ by the elite of Georgian London - feted in the capital of the British Empire at the height of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. What was her experience as an enslaved African woman writer abroad? Join us for a discussion about Ade’s play and current research as a Fulbright Scholar at Emerson College’s School of Arts.
Adeola Solanke is an award-winning playwright and screenwriter and founder of Spora Stories. Her plays include her acclaimed debut, Pandora’s Box, which won a Best New Play nomination in the Off-West End Theatre Awards and was shortlisted for the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, Africa’s biggest literary award. It toured to 17 UK venues. Her play The Court Must Have a Queen, commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces, was performed in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace. A double Fulbrighter, she’s a 22/23 Fulbright Distinguished International Scholar and was a Fulbright Post-graduate Fellow, Phi Beta Kappa International Scholar and Association of American University Scholar at USC where she earned an MFA in Cinema/TV and was twice an Academy Nicholls Screenwriting Fellowship semi-finalist. In LA, she was a story analyst for Disney, New Line and Sundance. She has a BA Hons in English Literature from the University of Sheffield, winning its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016. She’s written for the BBC, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Art Monthly, The Voice, West Africa Magazine and others. A founding Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, she was its British Film Institute Writer in Residence and has run playwriting programmes at the Royal Court Theatre, Soho Theatre and Arcola, and lectures in dramatic writing internationally.