Nittany Valley Writers Network: Actress, Playwright, Academic and Editor: Susan Russell

Susan Russell, long-time actress, playwright, and assistant professor of theatre at Penn State will speak about her work. Susan is the founder of Cultural Conversations, a new visual, theatre, and dance festival devoted to promoting and fostering new works that circle themes of global and local diversity. She also started the Body Language project, a program that encourages adolescent girls to write monologues on body-image issues, which they performed as part of Cultural Conversations' theater event last year. Related to that project is her new book, Body Language: Cultural Conversations Reaching Out and Reaching In, published by Eifrig Publishing of Lemont. Her plays Olympia (1998) and Present Perfect (1999) were performed in NYC; her play Severe Clear was a semi-finalist in the 2006 O'Neill Theatre Center Playwriting Competition and her 2009 play Ecoute: Pieces of Reynaldo Hahn toured 40 venues in the United States. She also is founding the academic journal Cultural Conversations: Works in Progress/Writers in the Making, debuting this month.

Tuesday, February 8, 7-8:30 p.m.

Community Room