Pulitzer Center Update

Wisteria & HOPE on the cover of Winston-Salem Journal's Relish section

Published: July 30, 2009

Images, music and the words of poet Kwame Dawes will be featured in two multimedia productions being shown together as part of this year's National Black Theatre Festival.

Wisteria is about a group of women who grew up in the American South in the years before the civil rights movement. HOPE: Living & Loving With HIV in Jamaica follows people coping with HIV/AIDS in modern day.

Both productions were written and are performed by Dawes, a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Wisteria is the result of an idea Dawes had when he was a volunteer at a resource center in Sumter, S.C., in the early 1990s. There, he got to know a group of people who were in their 70s and 80s...