Catalog: Biographies: Page 24 of 25

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Wilson, Emily Herring

American poet (see songs) working primarily in English

This entry contributed by G&K around 9/29/99

Emily Herring Wilson, author of Hope and Dignity: Older Black Women of the South, has taught at Wake Forest University, Salem College, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Cornell University. Also the author of Down Zion's Alley (1972), Balancing on Stones (1975), Solomon's Seal (1978), Arise Up and Call Her Blessed (1982), and Hope and Dignity (1983) [oral histories of North Carolina African American women].

This entry contributed by G&K around 9/29/99

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Wolfson, David

American composer (see songs) and poet (see songs) 3/15/1964 - , working primarily in English

This entry contributed by David Wolfson around 11/7/99

David Wolfson is a freelance composer, music director, arranger, pianist and copyist who has lived in New York City since 1986.

Mr. Wolfson studied composition with Eugene O'Brien and John Rinehart at the Cleveland Institute of Music, graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1985. In that same year he was awarded the first annual Darius Milhaud Award by the Darius Milhaud Society and won the Bascom Little Musical Theatre Composition Competition for his short opera, Rainwait. While in Cleveland, Mr. Wolfson spent four years as assistant musical director for the Cleveland Play House and taught on the faculty of the Play House Youtheatre.

He composes music for Maximillion Production' Story Salad series of stage revues for children, now in its thirteenth consecutive year, which has been seen by well over a million children, teachers and parents. He supplied incidental music for Merry Enterprises Theatre's production of Dammit, Shakespeare, and for the Actors/Playwrights Lab's premiere production of Richard Nash's The Loss of D-Natural. The Don Quijote Experimental Children's Theatre's Number 21, for which Mr. Wolfson wrote music and lyrics, was produced in 1989 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and his songs for Riverside Amusement Park's big-headed-costumed-character show Country Critter Jamboree were played 510 times over the course of one summer there.

>From 1989-1992, Mr. Wolfson was resident composer and music director of EM/R Dance Co., a choreographer's collective. From 1993-1996, he was co-artistic director (with choreographer Lynn Wichern) of Wichern/Wolfson dance & music, a company dedicated to performances involving both dance and live music; their final collaboration was Breath: The Passionate Life and Extraordinary Language of Emily Dickinson, an evening-length music-theatre work which they produced at St. Mark's Church in New York City in 1996. In connection with the company, Mr. Wolfson received several grants from Meet The Composer and a grant from the Music Program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Wolfson's concert works have been performed by such diverse forces as Synchronia, the Sirius String Quartet and the Bassoon Quartet of the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as on faculty recitals at Baldwin-Wallace Convservatory, Cleveland State University and the Cleveland Music School Settlement.

Mr Wolfson's music has been called "brilliant" by the Cleveland Plain Dealer; the New York Times referred to it as "musically inventive" and "theatrically forceful."

This entry contributed by David Wolfson around 11/7/99

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