A Nation at Peace with Itself: The Enduring Legacy of John Lewis
A Conversation Featuring John Lewis’s Longtime Director of Communications, Brenda Jones, Playwright, Psalmayene 24, and Historian, George Derek Musgrove
Presented in partnership with Mosaic Theatre Company and their production of Young John Lewis: Prodigy of Protest
by Mosaic’s Playwright in-in-Residence, Psalmayene 24
Learn More Here: https://mosaictheater.
It’s time to make some good trouble. Join us for a conversation honoring the legacy of former Congressman and Civil Rights icon, John Lewis. Psalmayene 24’s new musical, Young John Lewis, honors the legendary “Conscience of Congress.”
Brenda Jones is the former Senior Presidential Speechwriter in the Executive Office of the President of the United States for President Joseph Biden, the first African
American woman to ever hold that title. President Biden also appointed her to serve as a Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services during his administration. Before her appointment to the White House, she was an award-winning political communicator, speechwriter and author who worked in the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, DC for nearly 16 years. She was the primary speechwriter and lead communications strategist for the late Rep. John Lewis and was dubbed “the John Lewis whisperer” by Roll Call magazine. In 2015, she was named “One of the 20 Most Powerful Women Staffers on Capitol Hill” by National Journal magazine. In 2012, she won an NAACP Image Award for her book collaboration with Lewis called Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, which hit The New York Times Bestseller list in 2020. She is also a first-place winner of the Theodore C. Sorenson Speechwriting Awards and the co-author of a four-book series on political women called Queens of the Resistance about the lives of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chairwoman Maxine Waters, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Today, she is a contributing writer for The Contrarian and the founder and president of The John Lewis Institute of Peace, an American domestic peace organization. She holds a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, where she was a Gertrude Manning Fellow. She has a Masters in Journalism from the Alfred Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University, and a BA from Indiana University’s School of Journalism, as well as a certificate in environmental public policy from the University of Cambridge.
Psalmayene 24 is an award-winning playwright, director, and actor. He is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Mosaic Theater
Company. Playwriting credits include Young John Lewis (book & lyrics) at Theatrical Outfit; Monumental Travesties, Dear Mapel, and Les Deux Noirs at Mosaic Theater Company; Out of the Vineyard at Joe’s Movement Emporium; and Cinderella: The Remix at Imagination Stage. Directing credits include Tempestuous Elements at Arena Stage; Metamorphoses (Helen Hayes Award, Outstanding Direction of a Play) at Folger Theatre; The Colored Museum, Good Bones, Flow, and Pass Over at Studio Theatre; Necessary Sacrifices: A Radio Play at Ford’s Theatre; Native Son at Mosaic Theater Company; and Word Becomes Flesh (Helen Hayes Award, Outstanding Direction of a Play) at Theater Alliance. Acting credits include Dear Mapel at Mosaic Theater Company, Ruined at Arena Stage, and HBO’s The Wire. Psalm, as his colleagues call him, is the writer/director/producer of the short musical film The Freewheelin’Insurgents presented by Arena Stage. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and Actors’ Equity Association. On Instagram: @psalmayene24.
George Derek Musgrove, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America (U. of Georgia, 2012) and co-author, with Chris Myers Asch, of Chocolate City, A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (UNC, 2017). In 2021, he tried his hand at digital humanities, releasing blackpowerindc.umbc.edu , a web-based map covering thirty years of Black Power activism in the nation’s capital. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the New York Times and The Root. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “We must take to the streets again”: The Movement Resurgence in Conservative America, which explores the burst of black activism that rose in opposition to the urban crisis and the conservative retrenchment in the 1980s and 90s. He earned his Ph.D. from New York University in 2005 and now lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, D.C.
