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Challenging Books: A Live Theatre Experience

Experience an original performance exploring censorship, intellectual freedom, and the power of stories, followed by a community conversation.

Across the country, books are being challenged and removed from shelves. This performance explores what those challenges mean for readers, libraries, and our communities.

Living Text: Unbound | Challenging Books is an original devised-theatre work that uses movement, spoken word, and performance to examine intellectual freedom, censorship, and the right to read. The piece invites audiences to reflect on how book challenges impact personal stories, public institutions, and democratic access to information.

Following the performance, attendees are invited to a facilitated community conversation featuring director and choreographer, Nikkole Salter, and Dr. Melanee C. Harvey Fryar, an art historian and scholar of African American visual culture whose work examines representation, cultural memory, and the politics of storytelling. Together, they will explore First Amendment rights, current censorship trends, and the essential role libraries play in ensuring equitable access to ideas.

Featured Cast (in order from left to right):

 Jadah Clay, Mahlet Gebreyesus, Aysia Glenn, Joshua Leggett, Elyse Miller, Kameron Outland, Yisrael Robinson, and Quinn Taylor

About the Director:

Nikkole Salter is an OBIE Award–winning actress, writer, and educator whose career launched with the Pulitzer Prize–nominated play In the Continuum, co-written and performed with Danai Gurira. The production earned multiple honors, including an OBIE Award, the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, and international acclaim, with productions across the globe.

As an actress, Salter is known for originating roles in new works and has appeared in film, television, and major regional theaters. Her credits include Pride & Glory, Rockstar Games’ Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Godfather of Harlem, and New Amsterdam. She has starred in productions at Arena Stage, Berkeley Rep, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and on Broadway in The Great Society. She will next appear in James Ijames’ Wilderness Generation at Studio Theatre.

A celebrated dramatist, Salter has written eight full-length plays produced nationally and internationally. Her works have been published widely, and her play Repairing a Nation aired on WNET’s Theatre Close-Up. Her first anthology, Women, Worlds and the Right to Dignity, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2027. She made her directorial debut at Baltimore Center Stage in 2023.

Salter is also co-founder of The Continuum Project, a nonprofit using arts education for community empowerment, and she has served extensively in leadership roles across national arts organizations. A graduate of Howard University and NYU, she is a Professor of Theatre Arts at Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.

In Conversation With:

Melanee C. Harvey- Fryar is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She earned a BA from Spelman College and pursued graduate study at Boston University where she received her MA and PhD in American Art and Architectural History. In addition to serving as coordinator for the art history area of study at Howard, she served as programming chair for the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the university from 2016 to 2025.

She has published on architectural iconography in African American art, Black Arts Movement artists, religious art of Black liberation theology and ecowomanist art practices. Melanee was in residence as the Paul Mellon Guest Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art during the 2020-2021 academic year. In 2023, she was awarded the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation. She is the curator of Wherever There is Light (Fall 2024, TILT: The Center for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia, PA), Gordon Parks: Pastor E.F. Ledbetter and Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church (Spring-Summer 2025, The Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery, Pleasantville, NY) and Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life (Fall 2025), Howard University Museum, Dorothy Porter Room, Washington, DC). She is the author and editor of the accompanying exhibition catalogs for Wherever There is Light (2025) and Gordon Parks: Pastor E.F. Ledbetter and Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church (Fall 2025). 

Melanee is currently writing her first book entitled, Patterns of Permanence: African Methodist Episcopal Architecture and Visual Culture. 

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