Albert Borowitz
At first blush, the winner of the 1981 Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature might seem an unlikely candidate. When Albert Borowitz received the honor at age 51, he was still mid-career in Cleveland’s corporate legal community, a husband and the father of three. But several factors compelled him to pursue a concurrent writing career: a passion […]
Alberta Turner
For almost three decades, arising sometimes even before daybreak, Alberta Turner boarded a Greyhound bus in Oberlin, Ohio, and made the one-hour trip in to Cleveland, often not returning home till late in the evening. In her office on the 18th floor of Cleveland State University’s Rhodes Tower, she met with students throughout the day, […]
Adrienne Kennedy
Throughout her writing career, Adrienne Kennedy has used her own life experiences as symbolic of the divisiveness of American race relations. Like Kennedy, the characters in her plays are often light-skinned black women torn between their blackness and whiteness. Adrienne Hawkins was born in 1930 to Georgia-born parents who instilled in her a pride in black […]
La Wilson
The observation that we are surrounded, more than at any time in human history, by objects may not seem particularly original or significant. Indeed, much has been made of our obsession with acquiring things: The whole television industry is built on it. But we are not talking here about the sleek SUV glistening with raindrops in […]
Melvin Rose
Rose Iron Works began more than a century ago, and Melvin Rose has been involved with it for much of that time. In 1904, the Rose Iron Works complex started as the home and workshop of Melvin’s father, Martin Rose, and gradually evolved into a full-scale factory. Since the mid-1930s, Melvin Rose has worked in […]
Amy Casey
Amy Casey’s painted world is a precarious one. There, houses on stilts stand teetering on the brink of collapse or hang upside-down above an unseen abyss, roads resemble roller-coasters, and everything is always askew and asymmetrical. If these disturbing ‘burbs are populated at all, chances are good it will be with the small, twisted creatures that […]
David Giffels
Spend 20 minutes with David Giffels and you’ll fall in love with his hometown. A regular kid who grew up in a mid-sized Rust Belt city, Giffels has turned that into a career of setting the record straight on just how charming, vibrant and, well, cool Akron is. “Everybody I know owns a bowling pin,” Giffels […]