FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Press Release 08-192

“Liberating Shakespeare in Prison”: A Lecture by Agnes Wilcox, Founder of Prison Performing Arts
 
(St. Mary’s City, MD) Oct. 13, 2008 – Agnes Wilcox, founder and artistic director of Prison Performing Arts, will present a public lecture entitled, “Liberating Shakespeare in Prison” in the Cole Cinema of the Campus Center at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM).  The lecture is Monday, Oct. 20, at 4:30 p.m.  Prison Performing Arts is a non-profit organization based in St. Louis that works with adults and youth in the Missouri criminal and juvenile justice systems.  The organization provides the opportunity for current and former inmates to participate in the performing arts as artists, students, and audience members.  Beth Charlebois, associate professor of English at SMCM, spent her sabbatical year (2007-2008) working with Wilcox and the program as their scholar-in-residence.  The lecture is free and open to the public.  For more information, contact Charlebois at echarlebois@smcm.edu.

Wilcox is a theater director, actress and teacher.  As part of her work, she has been directing “Hamlet” at Hogan Street Regional Youth Center, a state juvenile correctional facility in St. Louis City.  Wilcox recently completed direction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Missouri Eastern Women’s Prison in Vandalia, Missouri, and “Richard III” at Northeast Correctional Center in Bowling Green, Missouri.  Her work with Prison Performing Arts was also featured in a one-hour documentary produced for National Public Radio's “This American Life,” hosted by Ira Glass.

Wilcox holds a master of fine arts in directing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has taught at New York University and Webster University, among others. Wilcox is the recipient of an advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and numerous organizations and universities.  She was the artistic director of The New Theatre (TNT) in St. Louis, where she produced more than 40 new and contemporary American plays.  Her current work with Prison Performing Arts is an outgrowth of the prison outreach program of TNT. Wilcox has also directed at theaters in Cleveland, Ohio; New York and Paris.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best liberal arts schools in the nation by “U.S. News & World Report,” “The Princeton Review,” and “Kiplinger’s.”  Founded in 1840 as Maryland’s “monument school” commemorating the state’s first capital, SMCM is the state’s only public honors college, offering “an Ivy-level College with a public-school price tag” (“Newsweek”).

Some 2,000 students attend the college, which has the highest graduation rate for all Maryland public colleges and universities, and an SAT average for student admissions of 1252. The school’s waterfront campus along the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland is home to the 2007 National Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Women’s, Sloop and Team champions.

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