Jasmine Guy continues to enjoy a diverse career in the arts. Well-known for the iconic role of Whitley Gilbert on the 1990s hit television series “A Different World,” Guy can currently be seen in “Harlem,” the comedy series from Tracy Oliver for Amazon Prime, and “Vanished: Searching for My Sister,” a movie for Lifetime that premiered in January. She stars in the new feature film “The Lady Makers,” which is currently available on Amazon Prime, and recently completed filming “Not Just Another Church Movie,” and the sequel to “A Wesley Family Christmas,” a holiday-themed feature film that aired in December on BET.
Guy’s long list of television credits include her recent multi-episode role in “Grey’s Anatomy,” Showtime’s “Dead Like Me,” HBO’s “America Me,” BET’s “The Quad,” the CW’s “Vampire Diaries,” NBC’s “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,” and the CBS miniseries “Queen” and “Stompin’ at the Savoy.” In 2019, she starred in the Oscar-nominated short film “My Nephew Emmett” and HBO’s short film “Irreconcilable.” Guy’s other film credits include “October Baby,” Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” Eddie Murphy’s “Harlem Nights” and “Diamond Men.”
Guy’s Broadway performances range from The Alvin Ailey Repertory Company to “Grease” (as Rizzo), to “Leader of the Pack” to “The Wiz” to “Chicago” (as Velma Kelly). On stage in Atlanta, Guy starred in the Alliance Theatre production of Pearl Cleage’s “The Nacerima Society,” Theatrical Outfit’s production of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” (with Kenny Leon), and she has starred in Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre productions of “Miss Evers’ Boys,” “Blues for an Alabama Sky” and “Broke-ology.” She has directed productions of “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf,” “Brownie Points,” and the Martin Luther King Jr. opera, “I Dream.”
Guy is author of the book “Evolution of a Revolutionary” (Atria Books), about the life and times of Afeni Shakur, black activist and mother of slain rapper Tupac Shakur.
As a vocalist, Guy has enjoyed performing on Broadway stages in musicals and has toured the country in the one-woman show “Raisin’ Cane,” with the Avery Sharpe Trio. “Raisin’ Cane” explores the literature, music, and political climate of the Harlem Renaissance, the rich decade between World War I and the Great Depression.
In the early 1990s, Guy’s debut self-titled album (Warner Bros. Records) crossed over musical genres with her hit songs “Try Me,” “Another Like My Lover,” and “Just Wanna Hold You.”
Jasmine Guy now travels the country sharing her vast and diverse experiences with people from all walks of life. She speaks at colleges, universities, conventions, and conferences, and leads workshops on diversity, acting, and living out your dreams, your aspirations, and your calling.
“Melvin Van Peebles: The Visionary Who Dared to Conquer Hollywood”
Wil Haygood is the author of nine books, among them biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. His most recent book, “COLORIZATION: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” was named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Critics and National Public Radio. He is a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and serves as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at his alma mater, Miami University, in Ohio.
A longtime national and foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer finalist, and then a national reporter for the Washington Post, Haygood has told the story of America from the angles of politics, entertainment, race, and sports. His book about White House butler Eugene Allen was adapted into the prizewinning film, “The Butler,” directed by Lee Daniels and starring, among others, Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, and David Oyelowo. Haygood served as an associate producer of “The Butler.”
In 2022, Haygood was awarded the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the only international literary prize based in America and given for a writer’s “enduring” body of work.
Simone Drake is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies and the Department of English at The Ohio State University. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on how people of African descent in the Americas negotiate the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation through the lenses of critical race, gender, and legal studies.
Drake also is the author of “When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making” (University of Chicago Press 2016) and “Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity” (Louisiana State University Press 2014, Southern Literary Studies Series); co-editor (with Dwan Henderson) of “Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century” (Duke University Press 2020); editor of “The Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing” (in progress); and numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Most recently, Drake was the Alisa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art where she did research on her current book project, “Becoming Educated: A Midwest Story” that is a meditation on the intersection between law, education, visual art, and music in relationship to the desegregation of Columbus (Ohio) Public Schools.