Sixth Annual Benefit Guests of Honor Blanche Wiesen Cook & Clare Coss
Blanche Wiesen Cook is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the biographer of New York Times best sellers Eleanor Roosevelt: Volumes One, Two, and Three forthcoming (Viking Penguin). Volume One received numerous awards including the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. This spring she was honored by John Jay College, Founding Generation Salute: “A Tribute to Blanche Wiesen Cook.” A frequent contributor of reviews and columns in many newspapers and periodicals, her book The Declassified Eisenhower was listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the notable books of 1981. For more than twenty years she produced and hosted her own program for Radio Pacifica, originally called Activists and Agitators, later renamed Women and the World in the 1980’s.
Her generative article, “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination:’ Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,” has been reprinted widely. Former vice-president for Research of the American Historical Association, she was Vice-President and Chair of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA,Inc). She was also Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Freedom of Information and Access Committee of the Organization of American Historians, which was actively committed to maintaining the integrity of the Freedom of Information Act.
Clare Coss is a playwright, psychotherapist and activist. Her newest work is the opera, Emmett Till, to be produced by the Harlem Opera Theater in 2017. Clare wrote the libretto, Mary Watkins composed the score for this American tragedy, inspired by her play, Emmett, Down in My Heart. The prize-winning play, with the underlying theme of white silence and responsibility, was presented in staged readings featuring Danny Glover, Kathleen Chalfant, Linda Powell, director Kenny Leon, in New York, East Hampton, Chicago, and Tucson. Produced in NYC by Castillo Theater, it also was presented in French in Paris; and will be produced by Berlin’s Afro-German theatre, LaBel Noir. Other productions include: Dr. DuBois and Miss Ovington, co-produced by Woodie King, Jr’s New Federal Theatre and CastilloTheater (Broadway Play Publishing); Lillian Wald: At Home on Henry Street starring Patricia Elliott (New Federal Theater); Growing Up Gothic (Theatre for the New City); The Blessing (American Place Theater); String of Pearls (Provincetown Theater); Taking Our Place in Time (Women’s Project/New Federal). The Arc of Love: An Anthology of Lesbian Love Poems (Scribner) was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. http://www.ClareCoss.com