Playwright, activist, and villager Lorraine Hansberry is best known for her award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun, which premiered on Broadway in 1959. She had an unflinching commitment to social justice which brought her under FBI surveillance in her early twenties. Hansberry was close friends with James Baldwin as well as Nina Simone, whose song “Young, Gifted, and Black” was dedicated to the playwright. Scholarship of Hansberry’s life has largely been relegated to her one mainstream work, but biographer and scholar Dr. Imani Perry chose to explore Hansberry’s life with careful attention to her queerness, feminism, and Black radical politics in her acclaimed 2018 biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Dr Perry will join us to explore Hansberry’s work and life as a true Village voice.
