Sunday, March 12, 2023
3:00 p.m. Williams Theatre
2:15 p.m. pre-concert lecture

CONCERT PROGRAM

Ravel arr. Raaf Hekkema Le Tombeau de Couperin
I. Prelude
II. Fugue
IV. Rigaudon
V. Menuet
VI. Toccata

Omar Thomas Moods and Attitudes (*world premiere)
I. Blues shuffle kerfuffle
II. Swan song, so long
III. Bebop, won’t stop

Jeff Scott Homage to Paradise Valley with poetry by Marsha Music, read by Quraysh Ali Lansana

Nina Simone (Coots/Lewis ver.) arr. Jelte Althuis For All We Know

About Quraysh Ali Lansana

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of twenty books in poetry, nonfiction and children’s
literature. Lansana is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow a Lecturer in English at the
University of Tulsa, and a Lecturer in Africana Studies at Oklahoma State University-
Tulsa where he also served as Director of the Center for Truth, Racial Healing &
Transformation. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU/NPR’s Focus: Black Oklahoma
monthly radio program, which is a recipient of a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award, a 2022
NAACP Image Award, a 2022 Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists Award and
was a Peabody Award nominee. Lansana is also the recipient of a 2022 Emmy Award, a
2022 Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Award and a 2022 National Educational
Telecommunications Association Public Media Award for his roles as host and
consultant for the OETA (PBS) documentary film “Tulsa Race Massacre: 100 Years
Later.” Lansana is a three-time International Regional Magazine Award-winning
Contributing Editor for Oklahoma Today magazine. A former faculty member of both the
Writing Program of the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Drama Division
of
The Juilliard School, Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks
Center
for Black Literature and
Creative Writing at Chicago State University from
2002-2012 and was Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing there until 2014. His
most recent books include Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, the skin of dreams: new and
collected poems, 1995-2018, The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as
Conscience & Change Agent) and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the
Age of Hip Hop. Forthcoming titles include Killing the Negative: A Poetic Intervention,
with Joel Daniel Phillips, a children’s biography of Ralph Ellison, and a series of books
on the Black Rodeo. Lansana’s work appears in Best American Poetry 2019. He is a
founding member of Tri-City Collective and serves on the Board of Directors of the
Philbrook Museum of Art and Oklahoma Humanities, is a Curatorial Scholar for The
Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art and a Curatorial Board Co-Chair
for the Ragdale Foundation. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and a member of the first cohort
of the Culture of Health Leadership for Racial Healing Fellowship.