Creative Intelligence

Both events presented in collaboration with Transylvania University’s theater program.

Naomi Wallace’s plays have been produced in the United States, Europe and the Middle East and include “One Flea Spare,” “The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek,” “In the Heart of America,” “The Breach,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East,” “And I and Silence,” “Night is a Room,” “The Return of Benjamin Lay” (co-written with Marcus Rediker) and adaptations of “Returning to Haifa” by Ghassan Kanafani and “The Corpse Washer” by Sinan Antoon (both adaptations co-written with Ismail Khalidi).

Awards include the MacArthur Award, Obie Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Horton Foote Award, Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the inaugural Windham Campbell prize for drama. In 2025, Wallace was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame. Wallace is currently writing the John Mellencamp musical “Jack and Diane.” 

Ismail Khalidi is a playwright and director born in Beirut and raised in Chicago. His plays include “Tennis in Nablus” (Alliance Theatre), “Truth Serum Blues” (Pangea World Theater), “Foot” (Teatro Amal), “Sabra Falling” (Pangea World Theater), “Dead Are My People” (Noor Theatre), “Guernica, Gaza” (Ashtar Theatre) and “The Magic Bullet” (Lub Dub). 

He has adapted two novels for the stage with Naomi Wallace: Ghassan Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa” (Finborough Theatre) and Sinan Antoon’s “The Corpse Washer” (Actors Theatre of Louisville). His most recent collaboration with Wallace, “Visions from the Center of the Earth,” premiered at Ashtar Theater in Palestine in 2024. 

Khalidi’s plays have been published in numerous anthologies, including the collection from Bloomsbury (2025) titled “Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi,” and Inside/Outside: “Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora” (TCG, 2015), which he also co-edited with Wallace. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, American Theatre Magazine, The Dramatist, Remezcla, Al-Jazeera, Mizna and The Kenyon Review. 

Khalidi holds an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has previously been an artist-in-residence at Teatro Amal, Mizna, and Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement. He is currently a Directing Fellow at Pangea World Theater.

Presented in collaboration with the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence and the Hazelrigg Lecture Series for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. He is the author of the bestselling books “The Message,” “The Beautiful Struggle,” “We Were Eight Years in Power,” “The Water Dancer,” and “Between the World and Me,” which won the National Book Award in 2015.

He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship that same year. As a journalist with a career spanning over two decades, he has written for numerous publications including The Washington City Paper, The Village Voice, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

During his time reporting for The Atlantic between 2008-18, he penned numerous articles and essays, including the National Magazine Award-winning 2012 essay “Fear of a Black President” and the influential June 2014 essay “The Case For Reparations.”

Coates also enjoyed a successful run writing Marvel’s “Black Panther” (2016-21) and “Captain America” (2018-21) comics series. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Presented in collaboration with Transylvania University’s Writing Center

Kayla Rae Whitaker is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and New York University. Her first novel, “The Animators” (Penguin/Random House), was named a best book of the year by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage; “The Animators” was also a Spring 2017 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a February 2017 Book of the Month Club selection. Her new novel — “Returns and Exchanges” — arrived this past spring. She lives in Queens, New York, and teaches high school English.

Presented in Collaboration with Transylvania University’s Morlan Gallery

Tom Jones (professor of Photography, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an artist, curator and educator. He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in photography and a Master of Arts in museum studies from Columbia College in Chicago.

Jones’ artwork is a commentary on identity, culture appropriation, experience and perception of Native America. He continues to work on an ongoing photographic essay on the contemporary life of his tribe, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin.

Jones co-authored the book “People of the Big Voice, Photographs of Ho-Chunk Families” by Charles Van Schaick, 1879-1943. He is the co-curator for the exhibition and contributing author to the book “For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw” for the National Museum of the American Indian. He recently curated a show on Ho-Chunk baskets for the Museum of Wisconsin Art.

Jones’ artwork is in numerous private and public collections, most notably: National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Sprint Corporation, Minneapolis Institute of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Library of Congress and Microsoft.

Presented in collaboration with the Delcamp Visiting Writer Program and the Bingham Center for Teaching Excellence

Tessa Hulls is an artist/writer/adventurer illuminating the connections between the present and the past. Her graphic memoir “Feeding Ghosts” explores the reverberations of her Chinese grandmother’s escape from the communist regime and her subsequent mental illness. Her work addresses racial justice, the immigrant experience, generational trauma, mental health, the creative process and the surprising feminist history of the bicycle. “Feeding Ghosts” has earned the Pulitzer Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for First Book, Eisner Award, Washington State Book Award and 2024 Libby Award. It was also named a Best Book of 2024 by Time, Forbes, NPR, the Minnesota Star Tribune, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library and others. 

Hulls’ essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts and The Margins. She has been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture and the Robert B. McMillen Foundation, and she received the Washington Artist Trust Arts Innovator Award. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Ucross and others.