Ifa Bayeza is an African American award-winning playwright, author, and theater artist. She was born Wanda Williams into an upper middle-class family with parents Paul T. Williams, physician, and Eloise Williams, teacher and psychiatric social worker. She decided to change her name to embrace her African heritage, a process that she describes as a rite of passage. Bayeza’s parents created an environment which encouraged all members of the family to embrace their artistic passions and where social justice issues were freely discussed. Their home was regularly host to many prominent African Americans including Muhammad Ali, W.E.B DuBois, and Sonny Till. After graduating from Harvard University and then the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MFA in Directing and Dramaturgy, Bayeza began to write professionally. She published a novel cowritten with her sister Ntozake Shange titled Some Sing, Some Cry (2010). It is a six-hundred-page book telling the stories of seven generations of black women, following the family from slavery during the Civil War all the way through to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It describes the personal identities of each woman and how they have been influenced by those who came before them. Bayeza has also written numerous award-winning plays. Her most well-known play is The Ballad of Emmett Till which was released to critical acclaim. The play tells the story of Emmitt Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was murdered by a mob in Mississippi in 1955 after he whistled at a white woman. It premiered in 2008 at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and has had productions performed at various locations ever since. The play won a number of awards including Ovation Awards, Drama Desk Critics’ Circle Awards, the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Play, and a Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference fellowship. It also earned Bayeza an artist-in-residence fellowship at the Rites and Reason Theater and the Providence Black Repertory Theater, both at Brown University. She recently expanded the play into The Till Trilogy, consisting of the three plays The Ballad, That Summer in Sumner, and Benevolence. She extended the work to include not only Till’s story, but also tell of the trial that took place after and how this event changed the Mississippi Delta. Bayeza has written several other plays that have been produced around the country including Homer G & the Rhapsodies in The Fall of Detroit, Kid Zero, Amistad Voices, and Club Harlem. The National Endowment for the Humanities has also recently named her the inaugural Humanist-in-Residence.

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