Reconnect. Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower - The Concert Version

Biographies

Toshi Reagon (Librettist, Composer, Music Director) is a talented and versatile singer, composer, musician, curator and producer with a profound ear for sonic Americana—from folk to funk, from blues to rock. While her expansive career has landed her at Carnegie Hall, the Paris Opera House and Madison Square Garden, you can just as easily find Toshi turning out at a music festival, intimate venue or local club. She has collaborated with many artists including Lizz Wright, Meshell Ndegeocello, Lenny Kravitz, Elvis Costello, Jason Moran, Climbing PoeTree and Nona Hendryx. As a composer for dance and theater works, she has worked with Michelle Dorrance Katori Hall, Urban Bush Women and The Jane Comfort Dance Co., among others. She is currently touring Bessie Award-winning The Blues Project with tap dancer Michelle Dorrance and Dorrance Dance. She founded WORD*ROCK*&SWORD: A Festival Exploration of Women’s Lives, a community festival that takes place throughout New York City every September since 2011. Together with her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon, she has created two operas with director Robert Wilson, The Temptation of St. Anthony and Zinnias, The Life of Clementine Hunter. She is a composer and performer in Meshell Ndegeocello’s Can I Get A Witness: The Gospel of James Baldwin. Toshi co-composed music for two Peabody Award-winning films and received a NYFA Award for Music Composition, the 2010 OutMusic Heritage Award and The Black Lily Music and Film Festival Award for Outstanding Performance. She is a National Women’s History Month honoree and was named a 2015 Art of Change Fellow by the Ford Foundation. She is a Andrew W. Melon DisTil Fellow with Carolina Performing Arts, A 2018 United States Artist Fellow, and a Andrew W. Melon Creative Futures Fellow Carolina Performing Arts. Toshi resides in Brooklyn NY, from their she continues to tour as a solo artist and with her band Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely. Her latest recording is SPIRITLAND available on digital release through Bandcamp.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, scholar, singer/songleader, activist. For over half a century she has been a profound contributor to African American and American culture. Born is Southwest Georgia, her singing style and traditional repertoire is grounded in her experiences in church, school, and political activism. As a composer, she has created a narrative of her social and political activism through her songs and larger compositions. She performed as a member of the SNCC Freedom Singers during the sixties, she founded an all women a cappella ensemble, The Harambee Singers during the Black Cultural Movement, She founded and led the internationally acclaimed “Sweet Honey In The Rock” for thirty years until retirement. Paralleling her work in music, Reagon is one of the leading authorities in African American Cultural History. She is a recipient of the Heinz Award for arts and Humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Presidential Medal and Charles E Frankel Prize for Contributions to the Public Understanding of Humanities

Octavia E. Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006). Octavia Estelle Butler is often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” was born in Pasadena, California. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena Community College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles. During 1969 and 1970, she studied at the Screenwriter’s Guild Open Door Program and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, where she took a class with science fiction master Harlan Ellison (who later became her mentor), and which led to Butler selling her first science fiction stories. Parable of the Sower (1993), the first of her Earthseed series, was a finalist for the Nebula Award as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The book’s sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), won a Nebula Award. A Full listing of her work can be found at octaviabutler.org