Anna Deavere Smith

An Obie Award-winning playwright, MacArthur fellow, and 2015 NEH Jefferson Lecturer for Intellectual Ideas, Anna Deavere Smith discusses her technique of interviewing real people to use their stories on stage. While a 2015 Hall Center for the Humanities Lecturer at the University of Kansas, she talks about her School to Prison Pipeline project which delves into the issues of suspensions in school, and how they link to incarceration among unprivileged youth, specifically Blacks, Latinos and other minorities, which has since spawned her 2016 play Notes from the Field. The author of On the Road: A Search for American Character also reads from her classic book, Letters to a Young Artist.

(Photo by John Mathew Smith CC BY-SA 2.0)