Key Note Speaker: John O'Neal John O'Neal was born in 1940 and earned his BA degree from Southern Illinois University in 1962. Upon graduation he became a Field Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From this involvement came the Free Southern Theater, which began as the Tougaloo Drama Workshop, founded by Mr. O'Neal and Gilbert Moses at Tougaloo College in 1963, and grew to become a theater of national significance. Settling in New Orleans in 1965, the Free Southern Theater combined a touring repertory company, a community engagement program in New Orleans, and training workshops in Black Theater. The FST expired in 1980. That same year ONeal organized Junebug Productions.
Among the plays he has written are Huricane Season; Where is The Blood of Your Father; When The Opportunity Scratches, Itch It; book and lyrics for a musical comedy, Preacher Man! Preacher Man!; and Jerusalem Gallows Dream. As a writer he has also participated in several collaborations: If I Live to See Next Fall, written and directed in collaoration with the Play Group of Knoxville, TN and songwriter/organizer Si Kahn. He has also collaborated on the writing of The Mozamgola Caper with Joan Holden and others from the San Francisco Mime Toupe.
Mr. O'Neal has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, among them the Louisiana Artist's Fellowship in Theater and grants from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. In 1988 he was awarded a major fellowship for playwriting from the Rockefeller Foundation. He was awarded an NEA Playwriting Fellowship in 1990 for work on a epic poetic drama about the slave insurrectionist, Nat Turner. O'Neal is one of three subjects in Doubleday's biography for young readers by Tom Cohen, Three Who Dared. His essays and plays have been published in numerous books and journals such as The Black Scholar, Tulane Drama Review, Black World, American Dialog, Yale Theatre, Plays From The Southern Theater and The Black Aesthetic. His poetry has also been published in New Black Voices. He is a regularly featured columnist in Southern Exposure, magazine, and contributed an essay on Junebug's Environmental Justice Project to a forthcoming book on environmental racism.
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