Wednesday Night Live: Ghana - Photographic & Poetic Reflections

Experience Ghana during an evening of poetry, music, art, and photography reflecting playwright Ruth Sloane’s recent sojourn to the Motherland. This Big Read in Charlotte event showcases Ghana's vibrancy as a result of Ruth's Arts and Science Council Creative Renewal Fellowship to explore ancestry. Participants will have a front-row seat to the beautiful cultural aspects of Ghana seen through the eyes of the playwright via a choreopoem, artifacts, and beautiful photography captured during her December trip to Africa.

The Big Read in Charlotte is a five-month-long series of free events designed to inform, engage, and promote literacy in our community – centered on the community-wide reading Yaa Gyasi's novel, Homegoing. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest created to broaden our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the power of a shared reading experience.

Ruth E. Sloane, playwright, producer, poet, director, actor, and educator has shaped community, character, and the arts in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area for nearly three decades. Sloane has written and/or directed more than 35 major works in the United States and Europe, including commissions by the Mint Museum, the National Committee for International Women's Day, the Afro-American Cultural Center (now Gantt Center), Theatre Charlotte, Afro-American Children's Theatre, and Cultural Educational Collaborative.

Sloane's works from 2017 until 2021 include directing "God's Trombones" for Gaston College, OIC-Atlanta, "In White America" and "CROWNS". She has written seven one-act plays based on the seven principles of Kwanzaa and wrote "100 YEARS," a play celebrating one hundred years of C.N. Jenkins. Sloane designed and worked as the administrator for The Global Peace Festival and The Festival of the African Diaspora presenting performers from Mongolia, China, Cuba, Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, India, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Japan, and Scotland. She studied Theater Arts at Mackinac College, Mackinac Island, Michigan.