Friday - December 1st, Park Auditorium - 3PM
Part of the Micheaux Visiting Filmmaker Series, Coordinated by A. Van Jordan, Park Distinguished Faculty-in-Residence, with guests Mason Richards and Dion Graham.
A. Van Jordan is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015).
Writer/Director Mason Richards was born in Guyana, South America and emigrated to Brooklyn, New York with his family at age 7, where he spent most of his youth. Mason has MFA in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts (CAL ARTS) where made his award- winning thesis short film THE SEAWALL shot entirely on location in Guyana, South America, his birth country. “The Seawall” short film which tells a story of family and migration was an official selection for the Cannes Film Festival-Court Mertrage (2011), the Havana International Film Festival in Cuba (2014), and has screened at festivals in the UK, Toronto, and throughout Caribbean, including the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival (2014).
Dion Graham, from HBO’s The Wire, also narrates The First 48 on A&E. An award-winning and critically acclaimed actor and narrator, he has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. Working with publishers large and small he's been honored with numerous Audie Awards, the Odyssey Award and Odyssey Honors, many AudioFile Earphone awards, and multiple PW Listen Up Awards. He's been named an AudioFile Golden Voice, Booklist's Voice Of Choice, Publishers Weekly's Narrator Of The Year, and to various other 'Best Of' lists. Known for excellence across genres his performances have been praised as thoughtful and compelling, vivid and full of life.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20171127102708335