Reading, Pa. – Award-winning, international playwright and author Lavonne Mueller will present a public lecture, “Human Rights: Issues in my Plays,” on Tuesday, March 1, 2011, at 4:30 p.m. This free event will be held in Klein Lecture Hall, Center for the Arts.
Mueller will be in residence at Albright College the week of February 28 through March 3 as a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. During the week she will conduct class visits and meet with various groups of faculty and students.
Mueller has written plays that have been performed across the country and abroad. Her play Letters to a Daughter from Prison, which is about the letters Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to his daughter while imprisoned for participation in India’s independence movement, was produced at the First International Festival of the Arts in New York City and went on tour in India. Her play Hotel Splendid, which portrays the “comfort women” of World War II who struggled to survive enforced prostitution by the Japanese Army, received an award for outstanding drama opposing war and injustice. Her play The Wounded Do Not Cry, about a World War II nurse at Normandy on D-Day, appeared in the Best American Short Plays in 2006.
Mueller’s textbook, Creative Writing, published by Doubleday and The National Textbook Company is used by students around the world.
In addition to being a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, Mueller is a Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writing Fellow, and has received a Guggenheim Grant, a Rockefeller Grant, three National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Fulbright Grant to Argentina, an Asian Culture Council Grant to Calcutta and a U.S. Friendship Commission Grant to Japan.
She has been an Arts America speaker for the United States Information Service in India, Finland, Romania, Japan, the former Yugoslavia and Norway. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Jordan and received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to conduct research in Paris.
Mueller holds a bachelor’s degree in English and theatre from Indiana State University and a master’s degree in English and drama from Northern Illinois University.
For more than 35 years, the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellows program has brought prominent artists, diplomats, journalists, business leaders, and other nonacademic professionals to campuses across the United States for substantive dialogue with students and faculty members. Through a week-long residential program of classes, seminars, workshops, lectures and informal discussions, the Fellows create better understanding and new connections between the academic and nonacademic worlds.
For more information or disabled assistance, please contact the Albright College Relations Office at 610-921-7526. Klein Lecture Hall is located in the Center for the Arts on the Albright College campus at 13th & Bern Streets, Reading, Pa.
Founded in 1856, Albright College is a nationally ranked, private college with a rigorous liberal arts curriculum with an interdisciplinary focus. The College’s hallmarks are connecting fields of learning, collaborative teaching and learning, and a flexible curriculum that allows students to create an individualized education. Albright College enrolls more than 1,660 undergraduates in traditional programs, another 500 adult students in accelerated degree programs, and 100 students in the master’s program in education. Albright College is located in Reading, Pennsylvania, about 60 miles west of Philadelphia.
