August Wilson, April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America”. He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called  The Pittsburgh Cycle  (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include  Fences  (1987) and  The Piano Lesson  (1990), both of which won the  Pulitzer Prize for Drama , as well as  Ma Rainey's Black Bottom  (1984) and  Joe Turner's Come and Gone  (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the  American Theater Hall of Fame .

In just fifteen years, American playwright August Wilson has become one of the most important voices in modern theater. He has won acclaim from literary and theater critics for his plays, which portray the African American experience in the twentieth century, one decade at a time. Born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 to a white German-American father and an African American mother, Wilson took his mother's name in the early 1970s. He grew up in Pittsburgh's ethnically diverse Hill District, where he was surrounded by the sounds, sights and struggles of urban African American life that would later fuel his creative efforts. But Wilson's appreciation for the culture in which he had grown up did not bloom fully until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in his early thirties. From that distance, he gained an appreciation of the richness of the culture and the language of the place where he had spent his youth.

Originally a poet and short-story writer, Wilson's first experience with theater wasn't until 1968, when he and a friend started Black Horizons Theatre Company in Pittsburgh. There, Wilson learned to direct plays, but still didn't consider writing them. It wasn't until 1977 that he converted some of his poems into a play. Called Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, the production was a success, but Wilson doesn't count that play as part of his playwriting career. Instead, he says, his career began in 1979 with his work on Jitney.

In 1983, Wilson wrote Fences, which opened on Broadway in 1987 and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the year. At this point, having already written three plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, Wilson set for himself the task of writing seven additional plays, one for each of the remaining decades in the century, each illuminating the African American experience of that time.

Ricardo Khan is a director, writer, educator and Tony Award-winning Artistic Director. He co- founded the Crossroads Theatre Company, one of history’s few African American theatres to ever rise to both national and international prominence as a major professional arts institution.

As a producer and director he has worked with luminaries such as Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Anna Deavere Smith, Melba Moore, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove and many more. He was Associate Producer for a number of Crossroads productions at the New York Public Theatre for the late Joseph Papp, and in 2005, with co-producer Woodie King, Jr., presented the Broadway tribute to August Wilson in the NY theatre that now bares Mr. Wilson’s name. Mr. Khan’s other directing credits include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hartford Stage, the Market Theatre in South Africa, Ford’s Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Cincinnati Playhouse, Florida Studio Theatre, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Village Gate and the world famous Apollo Theatre in Harlem. As a writer, he co-wrote the NAACP award-winning “FLY” with Trey Ellis about the esteemed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, “Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing”, also with Ellis, “Freedom Rider”, and “When Day Comes”, starring the internationally acclaimed singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock. Most recently, at the request of international film and theatre icon, John Kani, he travelled to Johannesburg to serve as director of South Africa’s first ever production of August Wilson’s “Fences” at the Joburg Theatre.

He was the Producer of the 2016 opening night gala ceremonies for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC with performers and creatives that included Yolanda Adams, Daniel Beaty, Dave Chappelle and Frederic Yonnet, Ava Duvernay, Savion Glover, Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder.

Ricardo Khan holds a BA in Psychology from Rutgers College, an MFA in both acting and directing from Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an Honorary PhD from Rutgers University where he is also in the University’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni. He served as President of the Board of the national theatre service organization, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), and is Artistic Director at the Crossroads Theatre Company.

Ebony M. Burton (she/her) is an Oakland-born, Brooklyn-based artist and lighting designer for theater and dance. She graduated from Oberlin College (BA in Psychology) and NYU Tisch (MFA in Design for Stage and Film). Credits include the end / the beginning (New York Live Arts), The Book of Lucy (Brown/Trinity),Marie It’s Time (MinorTheater), Cabaret (CAP21), Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play (Brown/Trinity), Blaze Ferrer's Gusher, In the Blood (NYU Grad Acting), Electric Feeling Maybe (Target Margin), Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse- Lautrec, and New Phase Collective's Phase One: The Underbrush, a multi-media/platform experience. Assistant/*Associate credits include *Merry Me (New York Theatre Workshop), *The Whitney Album (Soho Rep), *Encores: Oliver! (New York City Center), and Wolf Play (MCC Theater).

Myrna Colley-Lee makes her Writers Theatre debut with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; her sixth August Wilson play to date and third in collaboration with Director  Ron OJ Parson . Actively designing since the late 1960s, she is credited as one of the foremost costume designers in the Black Theatre Movement. Most recent works: All My Sons and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (St. Louis Repertory Theatre), Two Trains Running (Geva Theatre Center) Radio Golf (Pittsburgh Public Theatre), the world premiere of The Ballad of Emmett Till (Goodman Theatre), Gee’s Bend, The Piano Lesson, Forest City (Cleveland Play House), the Off-Broadway production of Becoming Adele (Gotham Stage Company), Ain’t Misbehavin’, Relativity (St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre), Wedding Band (Steppenwolf Theatre), Bus Stop and Fences (Allentown Playhouse). Her exhibition, A Theatre of Color: Costume Design for the Black Theatre,debuted at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in 2014. A comprehensive exhibition of Colley-Lee’s work, the show highlighted over 200 original costume designs, renderings and collages as a study of her design process. Colley- Lee’s work was also featured at the 2012 exhibition Songs of Social Significance at the San Antonio Tobin Collection Gallery of The McNay Museum, at the 2006 major exhibition at the Mississippi Museum of Art and in GladRags: Sketches, Swatches, and Costume Designs, which toured over a dozen venues. Colley-Lee has received numerous awards, including Outstanding Costume Design from the National Black Theatre Festival, the Winona Lee Fletcher Award for Outstanding Achievement as a Designer from the Black Theatre Network, Honored Artist from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Lifetime Achievement Award and the Doctor of Creative Arts, honoris causa, from Mississippi State University.