Playwright Lydia Diamond to Deliver Leon Forrest Lecture

Her lecture, “Making the Voices Speak,” will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Harris Hall Auditorium, 1881 Sheridan Road, on the Evanston campus. Free and open to the public, it will be followed by a reception in the Leopold Room, also in Harris Hall.

Diamond, who was a playwright-in-residence at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2007, is a Northwestern University graduate in theatre and performance studies. Her works have been performed across the country, including Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C., and on Broadway at New York’s Cort Theatre.

Her works include “The Bluest Eye” (an adaptation of Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name), “The Gift Horse,” “Voyeurs de Venus,” “Harriet Jacobs” and “Stick Fly.” The latter two plays are published by Northwestern University Press.

Among other honors, Diamond has won the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago Black Excellence Award, an American Alliance for Theatre and Education Award, a Back Stage Garland Award, a Black Theatre Alliance’s Negro Ensemble Company Award for Best Play and Lorraine Hansberry Award for Best Writing.

A winner of a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and an LA Weekly Theater Award, she has received commissions from The McCarter Theatre Company, Steppenwolf and The Roundabout Theatre Company.

The Leon Forrest Lecture is sponsored by Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the department of African American studies and the Northwestern University Black Alumni Association. It celebrates the life and work of the late Leon Forrest, novelist and beloved professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern.