Challenging Books: A Live Theatre Experience

About this event

Experience an original performance exploring censorship, intellectual freedom, and the power of stories, followed by a community conversation.

Across the country, books are being challenged and removed from shelves. This performance explores what those challenges mean for readers, libraries, and our communities.

Living Text: Unbound | Challenging Books is an original devised-theatre work that uses movement, spoken word, and performance to examine intellectual freedom, censorship, and the right to read. The piece invites audiences to reflect on how book challenges impact personal stories, public institutions, and democratic access to information.

Following the performance, attendees are invited to a facilitated community conversation featuring director and choreographer, Nikkole Salter , and Dr. Melanee C. Harvey Fryar , an art historian and scholar of African American visual culture whose work examines representation, cultural memory, and the politics of storytelling. Together, they will explore First Amendment rights, current censorship trends, and the essential role libraries play in ensuring equitable access to ideas.

Featured Cast (in order from left to right):

Jadah Clay, Mahlet Gebreyesus, Aysia Glenn, Joshua Leggett, Elyse Miller, Kameron Outland, Yisrael Robinson, and Quinn Taylor

About the Director:

Nikkole Salter is an OBIE Award–winning actress, writer, and educator whose career launched with the Pulitzer Prize–nominated play In the Continuum, co-written and performed with Danai Gurira. The production earned multiple honors, including an OBIE Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and international acclaim, with productions across the globe.

As an actress, Salter is known for originating roles in new works and has appeared in film, television, and major regional theaters. Her credits include Pride & Glory, Rockstar Games’ Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Godfather of Harlem, and New Amsterdam. She has starred in productions at Arena Stage, Berkeley Rep, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and on Broadway in The Great Society. She will next appear in James Ijames’ Wilderness Generation at Studio Theatre.

A celebrated dramatist, Salter has written eight full-length plays produced nationally and internationally. Her works have been published widely, and her play Repairing a Nation aired on WNET’s Theatre Close-Up. Her first anthology, Women, Worlds and the Right to Dignity, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. She made her directorial debut at Baltimore Center Stage in 2023.

Salter is also co-founder of The Continuum Project, a nonprofit using arts education for community empowerment, and she has served extensively in leadership roles across national arts organizations. A graduate of Howard University and NYU, she is a Professor of Theatre Arts at Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.

In Conversation With:

Melanee C. Harvey- Fryar is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art in the Chadw