Pearl Cleage

Pearl Cleage is an Atlanta-based writer who currently serves as Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and as Atlanta’s first Poet Laureate. A graduate of Spelman College, she is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dramatists Guild and the Paul Robeson Award from the Actor’s Equity Foundation. She is the author of 15 plays, including Blues for An Alabama Sky, which recently concluded a run at London’s National Theatre, and Flyin’ West, which was the most produced new play in the country after it premiered at the Alliance in 1992. She is the author of eight novels, including What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, an Oprah Book Club selection that spent nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Her novel, Baby Brother’s Blues, received an NAACP Image award for fiction in 2006, and her praise poem We Speak Your Names, written in collaboration with her husband Zaron W. Burnett, Jr., was a nominee for poetry honors the same year. In My Granny’s Garden, a book for children co-authored with Burnett and featuring illustrations by Radcliffe Bailey, was distributed free to 15,000 Atlanta children as part of the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club. Her performance work with Burnett is highlighted in a recent documentary film, “Live at Club Zebra!,” which was featured at last summer’s Bronze Lens Film Festival and was screened in October at the Pearl Cleage/Zaron Burnett Center for Culture and Creativity as part of the 2025 ELEVATE Atlanta Festival. She wrote the script for the animated film “Sit In,” which was broadcast free on Georgia Public Television prior to being banned in Cobb County, a distinction she wears with pride. Her play Angry, Raucous and Shamelessly Gorgeous, is scheduled for a production at the Geffen Playhouse in 2026 under the direction of LaTanya Richardson Jackson. She is currently at work on a new play entitled Flying Fish & Folding Money. Cleage makes her home in southwest Atlanta.

David Greenspan

David Greenspan has appeared in his plays Dead Mother, She Stoops to Comedy, Go Back to Where You Are, I’m Looking for Helen Twelvetrees, The Memory Motel; his solo plays The Argument and The Myopia; solo renditions of Barry Conners’ comedy The Patsy, Eugene O’Neill’s six-hour drama Strange Interlude and Gertrude Stein’s experimental Four Saints in Three Acts; premieres and revivals, notably Terrence McNally’s Some Men, Jordan Tannahill’s Prince Faggot, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, Goethe’s Faust, three solo plays: Joey Merlo’s On Set With Theda Bara, Mona Pirnot’s I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, Jerry Lieblich’s without mirrors; honors include Guggenheim, Lortel and Fox fellowships, Alpert, Lambda Literary, Helen Merrill Playwriting awards, a Ruthie and six Obies.​