SALON: Trinity Repertory Company Resident Artist Joe Wilson, Jr. on Strayhorn, Ferguson, and Black Lives in America.

With the support of a Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship, Wilson is currently writing a play about the life and work of Billy Strayhorn, the American jazz composer, pianist, lyricist, arranger, and close collaborator of Duke Ellington. Wilson is also one of 50 playwrights from across the country invited to participate in the 2015 Oregon Shakespeare Festival/One-Minute Play Festival’s “Every 28 Hours: An Investigation of The Events In Ferguson Missouri, and Black Lives In America,” a week-long residency in Ferguson and St. Louis, MO this fall, to be followed by performances of the resulting 50 one-minute plays in the playwrights’ home communities. The plays will be performed at Trinity on Monday, October 26 at 7pm, which is four days prior to this Salon presentation; show is free and open to the public, reservations are required! Reserve by email: rsvp@trinityrep.com, please include the date of the show in your request. Be sure to attend the performance, and join us for this conversation on the plays, as well as Wilson’s experience in thinking and writing about African-American lives from both history and the present.