Redemption: SONS premiered at the New Hazlett Theater in December of 2016. This program will be a  rebroadcast the full performance followed by live Q&A session with creators Dr. Tameka Cage Conely and Dr. Jason Méndez.

Redemption: SONS is hope. It is change. It is a parent’s soul split in two and fused back together again. An African American mother from Louisiana and a Boricua father from the South Bronx engage in a call and response “duologue” as they weave a story of race, ancestral memory, trauma, and healing.

Tameka Cage Conley, PhD is a literary artist who writes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and librettos. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship, and after graduation, the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in fiction. She is at work on her first novel--an epic family saga that spans six decades that considers the untimely deaths of African American men in northern Louisiana. She is the incoming Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oxford College of Emory University.

Jason Méndez is a nonfiction writer and interdisciplinary theater artist. His literary work explores South Bronx culture and history, the complexities of Boricua identity, fatherhood, and the concept of home. Rooted in ancestral memory, his stories embody an ancestral fury – from the enslavement of Taino Indians in post-colonized Puerto Rico to the gentrification and displacement of Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx. Jason is also cofounder of Block Chronicles (BC), a national web-series and online magazine profiling educators, artists, researchers, and community organizations in the fields of: Latinx Studies; Urban Education; Health Equity; and Arts & Culture. Currently, Jason is a visiting assistant professor of Education at Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh.

The New Hazlett Theater’s CSA Performance Series supports five emerging artists each year as they develop a new work for the stage. The artists we choose have artistic visions that run the full spectrum of the performing arts. We are proud to know that the work produced at the New Hazlett contributes to the rich cultural fabric of our city.

The Show Must Go On(line) is made possible thanks to generous support from the Benter Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Opportunity Fund, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and an Anonymous Foundation.

Redemption: SONS Presented by New Hazlett Theater