1996

After the unexpected success of The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (1991) and my subsequently aborted attempt to write a novel set in the mid-20th century, I started to cast about for a new historical subject for fiction. I was fascinated by seventeenth-century America, where I had set Mistress Coffin. But I was also fascinated by nineteenth-century America. I had some ideas of using the utopian communities of the period as a point of departure, but little more than that.

Dr. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon's work at AAS focused on the life and times of the first published African-American poet, Lucy Terry, who wrote "Bars Fight" in 1746. She is currently working on the performance piece From Safe to Brave.

The Genuine Article, a one-woman drama about the first female American columnist Fannie Fern premiered at the 1996 First Night Festival in Columbus and was performed the following year at the Cleveland Play House.

When I arrived at AAS in 1996 to immerse myself in research for Nightbirds in the Age of Light, a novel based on the Salem witchcraft trials, I had only recently begun writing it, but my interest in this period and place as the occasion for a novel dated back to my time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center.