Unlikely Heroines

Cussy Mary Carter is a book woman, a traveling librarian for the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, but to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she'll have to confront prejudice as old as the Appalachians and suspicion as deep as the holler. You see, Cussy is also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.

The convenience store where Keiko Furukara has worked for 18 years is her home and her happy place. She's very good at her job and feels very satisfied with it, if only the rest of the world would quit telling her she's supposed to want a different life. In her mid-30s, Keiko's being pressured to 'get serious,' get a bigger job, get married, etc., so she hatches a plan to just get the world off her back for a minute. It's a short, funny, delightfully subversive story that provides a sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

Lu, Chip, Bianca, and Flic are all hitting 50, the supposed ''age of invisibility,'' but they'd rather grow old disgracefully than live as if their lives are already over. This drama puts you in the car with the feisty foursome as they journey across Australia and across the years to their hometown and a school reunion. Laughing, sometimes crying, ruthlessly honest and often downright filthy, they share secrets while the desert roads turn treacherous.

This Booker Prize-winning novel chronicles the interconnected lives and trials of 12 different characters–predominately Black British women–over a 100-year period. There is no overarching narrative, but the lives of the characters intersect through friendships, relationships, or even through chance encounters in public places. It offers a too-often-unseen view of Britain’s contemporary and colonial history in the Caribbean and Africa and brings to the forefront a group of vibrant women of all different ages, faiths, and classes.

Proof of Love is an explosive, funny, and moving new one-woman play written by Chisa Hutchinson and performed by Brenda Pressley. To set the scene: Constance Daley, an upper-class Black woman, is in the hospital after her husband, Maurice, falls into a coma following a car accident. Soon, Constance realizes her marriage isn't what she thought it was, and her own classism and bias appear when she discovers her husband's mistress of eight years.

The Revisioners explores the depths of women's relationships: powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It recounts the haunting story of Josephine’s conjured escape from slavery as a child, her life as a widow and farm-owner, and the dangerous friendship she forms with her white neighbor as the Ku Klux Klan takes root in the post-Reconstruction South. Fast-forward 100 years, and Josephine’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Ava, has reluctantly moved in with her white grandmother who’s spiraling into dementia—or is it something more? What happens in between is the heart of this sweeping, multigenerational saga that's beautifully performed by Myra Lucretia Taylor and Adenrele Ojo.