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Dr. Anderson, a performance studies scholar, earned his BA and MA from Baylor University and his PhD from University of Texas in Austin. He focuses his research in the area of narrative theory and performance. He is the author of *The Student Companion to William Faulkne*r (Greenwood, 2007). In addition to publishing articles in *Text* and *Performance Quarterly*, he has served as book review co-editor for the journal. He performs nationally in his one-person shows as authors Henry James, William Faulkner, Washington Irving, Lynn Riggs, and Robert Frost. An audio podcast of his performance as Frost at the Seattle Public Library is accessible at http://www.spl.org/Audio/RobertFrost.mp3. He has received Chautauqua grants to present humanities programs on early America, the Civil War, the 1930s, and the Centennial of Oklahoma statehood. Dr. Anderson is a former Chair of the Performance Studies Division of the National Communication Association and served as Director of the Honors Program at Emerson for ten years.

Matt Chapuran joined the Stoneham Theatre staff after three years monitoring the fiscal performance of a national portfolio of 80 affordable housing properties for Boston Capital. Previously, he was the managing director of the Nora Theatre Company, based in Cambridge. Recently, Matt concluded a month long project teaching improvisation to MBA candidates at Babson College. He regularly contributed articles on property management andinformation services to various industry publications.

A. Philip Randolph was a prominent 20th century African-American civil rights leader and the founder of both the March on Washington Movement and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a landmark for labor and particularly for African-American labor organizing.

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Bob Dylan is a towering figure of late 20th century pop music, known for such songs as "All Along The Watchtower", "Like a Rolling Stone," "Tangled Up in Blue," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Lay Lady Lay." Dylan has been recording and performing since 1962, mixing folk, country, blues and rock; he sometimes startles his fans but almost always pleases the critics. During the '80s he toured extensively, and in the '90s his songs found a new audience and more acclaim from the music industry. In 1991 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Grammy; his 1997 album *Time Out of Mind* won three Grammys; and in 2001 Dylan won an Oscar for "Things Have Changed," from the movie *Wonder Boys* (2000). In 2006 he released his first album in five years, *Modern Times*.

Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 - April 8, 1993) was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. An African-American, Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. Their race-driven refusal placed Anderson into the spotlight of the international community on a level usually only found by high profile celebrities and politicians. With the aid of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions. She continued to break barriers for black artists in the United States, notably becoming the first black person, American or otherwise, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, occurring on January 7, 1955. Her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage. Anderson later became an important symbol of grace and beauty during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, notably singing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She also worked for several years as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and as a "goodwill ambassadress" for the United States Department of State.

Born in Asheville, North Carolina on March 9, 1922, McKissick did his undergraduate work at Morehouse and North Caroline colleges, and later graduated form the University of North Caroline Law School. During World War II McKissick served in the European Theater as a sergeant. After the war, he began legal practice in Durham, North Caroline, where he once represented his own daughter in her successful bid to gain admission to a previously all-white public school. Despite the victory, McKissick later decided that "integration" itself only magnified the perils faced by many black children, McKissick bitterly recalled that his children had been taunted and harassed: "Patches cut out of their hair, pages torn out of books, water thrown on them in the dead of winter, ink down the front of their dresses"-a demoralizing array of constant and relentless pressures designed to crack their composure and destroy their will to learn. The adversity no doubt deepened McKissick's nascent radicalism and militant zeal. As a lawyer, McKissick's most publicized efforts involved a segregated black local in the Tobacco Workers International, an AFL-CIO member. McKissick pressed to have black workers admitted to the skilled scale without loss of their seniority rating. McKissick also successfully defended "sit-in" protestors in the South. It was at this time the rupture widened between the older, established civil rights groups, dependent for their programming on a coalition of educated blacks and affluent whites liberals, and the younger, more rancorous black militants who turned their backs on most institutional whites support. The militants argued that the civil rights groups did not appreciate the urgency of many problems affecting black urban majorities, particularly in the job area where technology often reduced people to ciphers. When Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as head of CORE on January 3, 1966, the organization completed a 180-degree turn that saw it change from an interracial integrationist civil rights agency pledged to uphold nonviolence into a militant and uncompromising advocate of the ideology of black power. McKissick and Roy Innis, who at that time was the head of the Harlem chapter of CORE, were close allies, and when McKissick left CORE in 1968, Innis took over. After leaving CORE, McKissick launched a plan to build a new community, Soul City, on Warren County North Carolina farmland. McKissick saw Soul City as an integrated community with sufficient industry to support a population of 55,000. For his venture, he received a $14 million bond issue guarantee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a loan of $500,000 form the First Pennsylvania Bank. Soul City, however, ran into difficulties and despite the best offers of McKissick, the project never developed as he had anticipated. Finally, in June 1980, the Soul City Corporation and the federal government reached an agreement that would allow the government to assume control the following January. Under the agreement, the company retained 88 acres of the project, including the site of a mobile home park and a 60,000 square foot building that had served as the project's headquarters. The Department of Housing & Urban Development paid off $10 million in loans and agreed to pay an additional $175,000 of the project's debts. In exchange, McKissick agreed to drop a lawsuit brought to block HUD from shutting down the project.