SANDRA SEATON
Sandra Seaton is a playwright and librettist. Her plays have been performed throughout the country and her libretto for the opera From the Diary of Sally Hemings, with music by composer William Bolcom, has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.
Seaton was born in Columbia, Tennessee to Hattye Mary Evans and Albert Sampson Browne, Jr. in the same house where her mother and grandmother were born and where Thurgood Marshall was brought for his evening meals.
Her plays The Bridge Party and The Will combine fictional elements with historical events from Columbia.
The Bridge Party, the first of Sandra Seaton’s twelve plays, portrays a group of black women at their weekly bridge game. Inspired by the true story of the lynching of 17-year-old Cordie Cheek and oral histories about the Columbia Race Resistance, the play dramatizes the ways in which these women deal with the racism of their era, while still maintaining their dignity and self-worth. Ruby Dee starred in a 1998 performance.
Seaton’s play The Will, about a Columbia family during Reconstruction, is based on the lives of Seaton’s great-great-grandfather Cyrus Webster and his wife Eliza, who, with her parents, Annie and Dempsey Cherry, helped found Mt. Lebanon Missionary Baptist Church in 1843. In The Will, the Webster sons return from service in the Union army expecting to be treated as full citizens but find that victory at home is more elusive than victory on the battlefield.
Seaton’s other works include King: A Reflection on the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with spirituals sung by tenor George Shirley. In January 2020 the opera Night Trip, Sandra Seaton’s collaboration with composer Carlos Simon, about a young woman’s journey to Tennessee to visit her relatives, premiered at the Kennedy Center.
Seaton received her master of arts degree in creative writing from Michigan State University and was a professor of English, Creative Writing, and African-American Literature at Central Michigan University.
Plays
The Bridge Party (1989)
The Will (1994)
Do You Like Philip Roth? (2001)
Room and Board (2002)
Sally (2003)
A Bed Made In Heaven (2005)
Martha Stewart Slept Here (2008)
A Chance Meeting (2009)
Music History (2010)
Estate Sale (2011)
The Lookout (2013)
Black for Dinner (2014)
Other genres
“Nightsong” [short story], Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review (Winter 1989)
King: A Reflection on the Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2005). Spoken word with choral accompaniment.
Libretto: From The Diary of Sally Hemings (2000), CD: White Pine Music (2010). Score: Hal Leonard (2011)
Awards
Annual Emma Lou Thornbrough Lecture, IUPUI and Butler University, November 2008
Inaugural writer-in-residence, Michigan State University College of Law 2010-11
Mark Twain Award from The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. 2012
Theodore Ward Prize
Residencies: Yaddo and Ragdale artist colonies.
Videos
Playwright and Author Sandra Seaton at Kerrytown BookFest
From the Diary of Sally Hemings, sung by soprano Alyson Cambridge, August 2020