Tin Ears

Gregory Powell graduated from Morehouse College in 1987 with a degree in journalism and worked several years as a news reporter at the Memphis Business Journal, Jackson Sun and the Commercial Appeal; he earned a Doctor of Laws Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School in 1994; a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa in 2004, and a Masters of Divinity from the School of Divinity at Regent University in 2014. He has worked as a labor and employment law attorney for the federal government almost twenty years. He currently works as Professor of Ethics and Leadership Development at William Seymour College, and operates his own labor and employment law consulting firm. Previously, his poetry has been published in Callaloo, African American Review, Langston Hughes Review, Arkansas Review, story south (on-line journal), Antietam Review, Poem, touchstone, Mosaic, Lake Effect and Tar Wolf Review. He is currently writing a cycle of seven plays that address Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Employee Rights, Working Conditions, Race Relations, and Religion in the 20th Century. The Aldridge Repertory Theatre, Inc., presented a Staged Reading of his first play, “Ruby’s Harmonicas & Pianos, Incorporated,” at Downtown Theatre (Birmingham, Alabama: 16 April 2016); Ruby’s addresses Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, unions and employee rights; the second play in the cycle, “Turpentine Beans Bones Blues,” is set in rural Georgia in 1928 and examines Convict Leasing; the third play, “No Honey in the Rock,” is set in Memphis and explores Institutional Racism, Unions, and employee rights, against the backdrop of the Memphis Sanitation Strike. He is currently researching and writing the fourth play, “Fire in my Bones,” which examines the genesis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A fifth play in the cycle, Levi Processing & Packaging, Inc., is still in the formative stage.