1. https://youtu.be/N16fT56tkwE
August Wilson

2. “You have to know where you came from in order to get where you’re going”

3. Plays
Inspiration
Why I love him

4. Plays As written: 1979 - Jitney 1982 - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Fences
Joe Turner's Come and Gone
The Piano Lesson
Two Trains Running
Seven Guitars
King Hedley II
Gem of the Ocean
Radio Golf

5. 4 B’s
Baraka
Bearden
Borges
And the biggest one of them all… The Blues

6. Amiri Baraka
Playwright
Activist
All around cool cat
From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays.

7. Romare Bearden
"Bearden's art in particular has been influencing me because of the manner in which he treats black life--in all of its richness and fullness in a formal artistic language, and he connects it to the great traditions in art, whether they are Dutch or whatever. But his subject matter is the black experience in America." 

8. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.’ 

9. “I've been trying to write a play the way he writes a story," said August Wilson, "tell you exactly what was going to happen" 
Short story writer, poet
‘From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. 

10. The Blues
"I put that on, and it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before," Wilson recalls. "Somehow, all that other music was different from that. And I go, 'Wait a minute. This is mine… there's a history here.'"

11. Wilson says the blues are life's instructions: "Contrary to what most people think, it's not defeatist, 'Oh, woe is me.' It's very life-affirming, uplifting music. Because you can sing that song, that's what enables you to survive."

12. Why I LOVE him
SHSU
TWU

14. Works Cited