WLP Scholar Series: Adeola Solanke on Phillis Wheatley

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and founder of Spora Stories Ade Solanke’s original new play, Phillis in London, dramatizes and re-imagines Wheatley’s experience of being an enslaved African woman writer abroad in Georgian London, “celebrated” by the elite of the capital of the British empire at the height of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A Londoner by birth, Solanke will explore her inspirations for the piece and how she deploys histories of The Sons of Africa, the Bluestockings, the Sons of Liberty, and the stories of individuals such as Ignatious Sancho, Dido Belle, Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson, to bring to life an African-American literary journey into 18th-century London.

Free and open to the public. RSVP on Eventbrite by Monday, November 7.