a.k. payne, an African-American playwright of extraordinary range and lyricism whose work we will be seeing for a long time to come. Her work is rooted in a scholarship of both history and imagination. a.k.’s characters are Black women dealing with oppression and sometimes joy; they are historical and fictional, they all struggle in diaspora for a language of home for the heart of the Black woman. a.k. payne has had the unusual and well-deserved honor of acceptance into the Yale School of Drama graduate program in Playwriting, rarely offered to very recent undergraduates.