Andrea Hairston is a Professor of Theatre at Smith College where she directs, teaches playwriting, and African, African American, and Caribbean theatre literature.  A playwright, director, actor, and musician, she is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has produced original theatre with music, dance, and masks for over twenty-five years.  Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on Public Radio & Public Television.  She has also translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English.   

Ms. Hairston has received many playwriting and directing awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant to Playwrights, a Rockefeller/NEA Grant for New Works, an NEA grant to work as dramaturge/director with playwright, Pearl Cleage, a Ford Foundation Grant to collaborate with Senegalese Master Drummer Massamba Diop, and a Shubert Fellowship for Playwriting.  

Since 1997, her plays produced by Chrysalis Theatre, Soul Repairs, Lonely Stardust, and Hummingbird Flying Backward, have been science fiction plays.  Archangels of Funk, a SF theatre jam, garnered her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for 2003.

 Her speculative novel, Mindscape, excerpted in Dark Matter: Reading The Bones, an anthology of African diasporic speculative fiction edited by Sheree R. Thomas and published by Warner Books in 2004, will be published in 2006 by Aqueduct Press.  Griots of the Galaxy, a short story, appears in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future an anthology edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan and published in August 2004 by Arsenal Pulp Press. An essay, “Octavia Butler--Praise Song to a Prophetic Artist,” will be included in Daughters of Earth ed. by Justine Larbalestier, forthcoming in 2006.  She is currently working on a new novel, Exploding in Slow Motion, for which she received the 2004 Speculative Literature Foundation’s Older Writer Grant.

Mindscape
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ISBN: 1933500034
Format: Paperback, 452pp
Pub. Date: March 2006
Publisher: Aqueduct Press

Synopsis:
It is over one hundred years after the fall of a mysterious Barrier divided Earth into Los Santos, New Ouagadougou, Paradigma, and an uninhabited Wilder­ness.  Corridors open at seasonal intervals allowing limited interzonal travel, otherwise only mutant Vermittler (German for go-between) can penetrate the Barrier and travel the Zones at will.  Airplanes, radio waves, missiles, and submarines cannot get over, under, or through the Barrier.  It vaporizes anything which attempts non-corridor penetration. Each Zone is faced with crises: food shortages, incur­able diseases, social unrest, spiritual chaos, scientific, political, and artistic stagnation, and environmental degra­dation. 

Elleni, a Vermittler and spiritual outcast in a Nouveau Africain culture, reluctantly takes up the mantel of her assassinated mentor and works to bring about world peace.  With little preparation, she must battle a startling coalition of corrupt politicians, ruthless gangsters, and fundamentalist spiritual leaders who prefer the balance of power that interzonal war affords.  Elleni gets support from Ray, an action-adventure Entertainment star who has never been a hero off-screen, Lawanda, an "ethnic throwback," who evokes the past to power her identity, and an old Shaman who betrayed her people, her beliefs but now hopes for redemption.  This motley crew seems no match for the Barrier or the power-hungry coalition who could destroy the world they seek to dominate.  As Elleni and crew struggle to be agents of change and set the world back on its course, they discover resources within themselves and allies in their world that they couldn't have imagined.

 

 

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