The Joslyn Castle & Gardens and Metropolitan Community College are partnering once again for the Art & Literary Festival. This year will be a celebration and exploration of one of the most electrifying and influential moments in American history, the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920’s, in African American communities in New York City and in cities throughout the North and Midwest, creative and intellectual life thrived.

A public reading of two original one-act plays by local playwrights Kim Louise and Peggy Jones will take place at 2pm on November 15 and include a talkback session with the playwrights.

To purchase performance tickets, reserve free lecture tickets, and view more information about the full schedule of festival events, visit the festival website: https://www.joslyncastle.com/event/art-literary-festival-the-harlem-renaissance/.

Peggy Jones, M.F.A. (UNL ’93-Painting/Printmaking) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and affiliate faculty in both Women’s and Gender Studies and Medical Humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). She is an artist and playwright who has won awards for both her visual art and writing. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council for her play, The Journey, about Aaron Douglas, the first black graduate from the art department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922. Her most recent play about Black radical feminist Florynce Kennedy was performed in January 2018 at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE. She is also in the Speaker’s Bureau of Humanities Nebraska on the topic, Aaron Douglas, UNL ’22.

Kim Louise, one-act playwright and discussion leader: A native Omahan, Kim has penned over eleven novels and five novellas, writing for Kensington Press (BET Books), Genesis Press, and Harlequin Enterprises and earned a spot on Amazon’s bestseller’s list for mass market fiction. Her poetry has been published by the Cathartic Literary Journal and Third World Press. One of her short stories appears in the national anthology Chicken Soup for the African American Soul. Kim is the past president of the New African Writer’s Workshop and has facilitated the North Omaha Summer Arts Women’s Writing Group for the past 10 years. Kim has written 20 plays–one of which received a full production at the Union for Contemporary arts. She holds Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.