New Titles on New Book Shelf

In "This Is America" Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape, Katie Rios argues that prominent American artists and musicians build encoded gestures of resistance into their works and challenge the status quo. These artists offer both an interpretation and a critique of what "This Is America" means.

Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. Michael R. Jackson's blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons - not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head - in an attempt to understand his own strange loop. A Strange Loop received its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in New York in the summer of 2019. It went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Best Musical and Best Book of a Musical at the 2022 Tony Awards. 'A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities' Pulitzer Prize Committee