Staged Reading: Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin, Directed by Andrina Smith

Jeffrey Colvin’s debut novel, Africaville (Amistad/HarperCollins) was awarded a 2020 Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Africaville has been featured in Publishers Weekly, NPR, WBAI, Vogue, the Boston Globe, the BBC, the CBC, The Globe and Mail, Lithub, and elsewhere. His essays and short fiction have appeared in Narrative, Hot Metal Bridge, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Millions, The Brooklyn Rail, and other magazines. He is a graduate of the US Naval Academy, Harvard University, and Columbia University, where he received an MFA in fiction. He is an assistant editor at Narrative magazine and this fall will be the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown fellow at Brown University.

Andrina Wekontash Smith is a Shinnecock storyteller, writer, performer, and educator whose work explores the complexity of racial and indigenous identity. Currently, she is working on a series with ABC Signature, produced under Kerry Washington's Simpson Street banner. She recently wrote the script for an immersive VR collaboration between TIME Studios and the Martin Luther King Foundation, which examines the racial disparities in policing, housing, and voting in society today. The VR experience will be showcased at SXSW 2023. 

In 2021, Andrina was a NAMA fellow and recipient of the Netflix accelerator grant. Her collaboration with the Facebook app, "The Darker Red Road," received over three million views. Her piece, "Women of Herstory," was highly praised. As a sketch performer, director, and performance artist, Andrina has received residencies at Guild Hall and The Watermill Center.

Her written work and essays have been featured in publications such as Edible's East End, Native Max Magazine, and WildSam's East End Edition. Overall, Andrina's work seeks to bring attention to the nuances of identity and elevate the voices of underrepresented communities.

Photo: Lindsay Morris

Executive Director of Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center since 2007, Bonnie Michelle Cannon is a pioneer of leadership. The first African-American woman to be elected to the Southampton Board of Trustees, she currently serves on the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission and as chair of the Town of Southampton Housing Authority. A recipient of the Southampton Village Citizenship Award, she has also served on the Southampton Village Cultural Center Board and the Southampton Village Planning Commission. She is the co-founder of the East End African-American Museum and Center of Excellence and Coordinator for Neighborhood Community Meetings. A graduate of Howard University with a degree in Computer Management Information Systems, Cannon spent 20 years in Regional and Senior Staff management positions at Verizon.

Donnamarie Barnes has spent over thirty years working in the editorial photography field as a photographer and photo editor for publications such as People and Essence Magazines, and as an Editor at the Gamma Liaison photo agency. A life-long summer and full-time resident of the SANS Community in Sag Harbor, she curated a highly acclaimed historic tintype photography exhibition 2015 at the Eastville Community Historical Society entitled, “Collective Identity.”  

Donnamarie began at Sylvester Manor in 2014 as a volunteer and history docent, and in 2016 joined the staff as Curator & Archivist. Over the past three years she has curated the exhibitions, “Women of the Manor,” “A Place in Pictures,” and “All That Has Been: Our Roots Revealed.” Her work uncovering the lives and identities of the enslaved and Indigenous people of Sylvester Manor is ongoing and is an integral part of the Manor’s mission to preserve, cultivate and share the stories of all the people of Sylvester Manor. 

Plain Sight Project, Chair; Curator/Archivist Sylvester Manor Educational Farm 

Willie Jenkins, Bridgehampton Native is a 37 year old Community Organizer, Activist, Founder of the Zenith Youth Program, and Co-Admin of Black Lives Matter of The East End. He also is the Organizer of The Annual Bridgehampton Day, a huge event each summer bringing the people of Bridgehampton back together to celebrate their culture, rich town history, promote local businesses, continue their basketball tradition through an annual game, and to have an all out good time. 

DJ Potts is a Sound Artist whose work is generally heard in Off-Broadway and Regional Theatres in the United States.  He has one statement: "Please call the office of Louisville Metro Mayor, Greg Fischer, and Demand the Arrest of Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove for their involvement with the Murder of Breonna Taylor. BLM.”

David Rattray is the owner and editor of The East Hampton Star. He is the fifth member of the Rattray family -- over three generations -- to serve as editor of The Star. He is a co-director of the Plain Sight Project study of slavery on Long Island, N.Y. In addition to journalism, he has a background in documentary filmmaking, museum development, and boatbuilding. He attended the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, N.Y. and graduated from East Hampton High School and Dartmouth College. His early jobs included summers as a busboy, an East Hampton Town lifeguard, an assistant caretaker on Gardiner's Island, selling fish, setting up party tents, making party rental deliveries, staffing the liquor checkout counter at a Cambridge, Mass., grocery store, and as a field archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History. He was associate producer on the public television documentaries "The Hurricane of '38" and "Chicago 1968" for the American Experience and "Tabloid Truth" for Frontline. He worked for Design Division, a museum design firm in Manhattan, before returning to East Hampton in 1998 to work at The Star. He became its editor in 2003, succeeding his mother, Helen S. Rattray.