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 […]