Rain Come Soon screenplay wins festival award

When I was in graduate school, my doctoral advisor used to pass around the book he assigned for a particular week. He said touching it made the book real. Over the past year, I made several dozen tiny paintings to make the characters in a screenplay I wrote real. The paintings, not unlike archival documents, pushed my thinking on the storyline in RAIN COME SOON, the screenplay, which is partially an adaptation of a book I wrote.

This week, I learned the screenplay tied for first prize in this year’s Reel Sisters Film Festival and Lecture Series, the first Academy Award qualifying festival for women of color. The prize includes a meeting with an industry professional. I share as much to also invite you to see some of the amazing films that will be shown through November 7. Let’s support independent filmmaking while we catch our breaths and barrel toward the end of the semester. Get your virtual pass here: https://reelsisters.org/ Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival & Lecture Series

I am slowly making my way through the films in this year’s Reel Sisters Festival. I saw one touching short revealing the possibilities of healing between mothers and daughters. It is absolutely stunning and arrives like a cinematic poem surrounding something seemingly mundane: hanging laundry on the line like we used to do back in the day.

Another pays homage to the great black women singers (Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Abbey Lincoln) and the costs they paid for their activism. I just addressed Horne’s experiences in my American Civilization Since 1865 class at the University of Alabama alongside mention of the Tuskegee Airmen and you could hear a pin drop in the auditorium. The students were that attentive. It’s a privilege to share these stories onscreen and in the classroom and yes, it is also a privilege to share via painting.