Education
Brown University; Smith College.
director novelist performer playwright professor
Brown University; Smith College.
Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012. She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for more than a decade. Hairston is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College.
She teaches playwriting, African, African American, and Caribbean theatre literature.
Her plays have been produced at Yale Representative, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and television In addition, Hairston has translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English.
Hairston was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where as a teenager she did community organizing work with union, civil rights and antiwar activism. She currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
2011 James Tiptree, Junior. Award for Redwood and Wildfire International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for distinguished contributions to the scholarship and criticism of the fantastic, 2011 2006 Carl Brandon Parallax Award for Mindscape, 2010 Launch Pad—Fellow at National Aeronautics and Space Administration-funded Writer’s hop, August 2008 Guest of Honor, Diversicon Science Fiction Convention, Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 2007 James Tiptree, Junior. Award Finalist for Mindscape, 2006 Philip K. Dick Award Finalist for Mindscape, 2007 Older Writers Grant, Speculative Literature Foundation for Exploding in Slow Motion excerpt, 2004. National Education Association Grant to Playwrights, a Ford Foundation grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting.
