Kelundra Smith
Managing Editor at American Theatre
Theater Critic and Cultural Journalist at Freelance
Director of Pubs @bookstcg @americantheatre. Words in @nytimes, @gardenandgun, etc. Playwright behind The Reconstruction Trilogy. Our best days are ahead of us.
Articles
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3 weeks ago |
gardenandgun.com | Kelundra Smith |Anna Davis
For centuries, music was the only avenue in America through which Black people could connect to their culture and a sense of joy. Spirituals, field hollers, and folk songs helped pass the workday before and after the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet as sharing music became more industry than art, Black Americans were often written out of the very genres they helped birth: country, blues, folk. The desire to reclaim those cultural traditions is part of what drives Rhiannon Giddens.
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Jan 9, 2025 |
americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith
Last October, I had the chance to attend the annual Freedom Awards, hosted by the National Civil Rights Museum. The 2024 honorees were civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights leader Xernona Clayton, and filmmaker Spike Lee. In all of the remarks and speeches that evening, it became even clearer to me that for every movement, there must be a countermovement. This is how we truly balance the scales of justice in the United States of America.
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Oct 2, 2024 |
gardenandgun.com | Kelundra Smith |Gabriela Gomez-Misserian
Arts & CultureThe revival of a civil rights landmark reaches a majestic milestone By the time Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis to lead a march in the spring of 1968, city sanitation workers had been on strike for more than a month. After a faulty garbage truck crushed two of them to death, the mostly Black male workers met and organized the strike at Clayborn Temple.
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Sep 26, 2024 |
atlantamagazine.com | Kelundra Smith
ARTlanta is a quarterly column dedicated to celebrating the artists, creatives, and designers who give Atlanta its flavor. It’s been a while since my last ARTlanta column. I spent most of the summer doing something new, as I saw the play I wrote, The Wash, take flight in a co-production by Synchronicity Theatre and the Impact Theatre. I reviewed theater in Atlanta for more than a decade, and it was truly a surreal process to be on the other side of the stage.
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Sep 11, 2024 |
americantheatre.org | Kelundra Smith
The musical Waitress charmed Broadway audiences in its 2016-21 run (following its 2015 premiere at American Repertory Theater). Now regional theatres are dipping their spoons for a taste. The story of Jenna, a young woman stuck in a bad marriage and a dead-end job at a small-town diner who finds solace in baking, started as an independent film starring Keri Russell and eventually made its way to the stage with catchy tunes by Grammy winner Sara Bareilles.
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It's closing week of THE WASH in St. Louis at The Black Rep. The cast is immaculate, the creative team is sharp, the entire staff of the theater has been a dream, and the reviews have been lovely. This piece resonates so much now. I am ever grateful. https://t.co/OIwjSliExp
This country needs to be saged. We need a healing ceremony badly in every community everywhere. Grab your oil, incense, sage, palo santo, etc. and speak life over whatever corner of the world you're in. The energy has to shift. It's past time for a new paradigm.
This weekend, my play THE WASH, which is a comedic drama inspired by the Atlanta Washerwomen's Strike of 1881, opened in St. Louis and ATL. Audiences showed up in the wind and rain. In STL, they had to hold the show for a tornado and no one left. THANK YOU to the audiences!