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HMAAC Announces Poet Laureate Emeritus Deborah Mouton Artist Residency at The Power Center
The Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) is pleased to announce the May/June HMAAC artist residency of Deborah Mouton, the internationally known writer, educator, activist, performer, and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. The residency will take place at The Power Center in Houston, Texas and will involve engagement of students from The Imani School.
During her HMAAC residency Mouton will review and edit her renowned play The World’s Intermission, which premiered November 12, 2021 at Jones Hall for the Society for the Performing Arts. The play, A Deep Ink Production, focuses on the world’s two year pandemic, and how one family dealt with quarantine amidst fragile mental health conditions, rising racial tensions, and the coming Texas Spring, the perfect storm for imagining a new beginning.
According to Mouton, “I wrote the play to inspire and as events continue to unfold I wanted to revisit it. This residency allows me to do that, and I am delighted to have Imani School students involved in the project.”
Imani Principal Pat Williams sees the residency as supporting the school’s intentions; “At The Imani School we are intentionally igniting a fire within our children that breeds self-confidence, faith, and academic achievement, and this residency helps us do that.”
For HMAAC CEO John Guess, Jr. this residency is about exploring where we have been and our strengths as we move forward. “As we continue to adjust to our new pandemic normal,” he indicated, “this play reminds us of our resilience and the human gift of adaptability,“
HMAAC Board President Cindy Miles added, “We are so delighted to bring the talent of Deborah Mouton into a community of color, and we could not have a better partners in this endeavor than The Power Center and the Imani School and its Principal Pat Williams.”
The culmination of the residency will be performances of The World’s Intermission at The Power Center June 24 and 25.
Mouton’s residency is sponsored by the Houston Endowment, HEB, Craig McGowan and the Board of Directors of HMAAC.
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ABOUT DEBORAH MOUTON
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally known writer, educator, activist, performer, and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World (PSI), Her work has appeared in Houston Noir by Akashic Press (2019), Black Girl Magic by Haymarket Books (2019), the Texas Observer, and Fjords Journal, and on such platforms as NPR, BBC, ABC, Apple News, Blavity, Upworthy, and across the TedX circuit. Honored by Houston Business Journal as a part of their 2021 40 Under 40 class, She has served as a contributing writer to Texas Monthly, Glamour Magazine, and ESPN’s The Undefeated. Her most recent stage play, The World’s Intermission, debuted at Jones Hall in Houston, TX in Fall 2021. Her second book, Black Chameleon is set to release in 2023 by Henry Holt & Co. A storybook opera, entitled Lula, the Mighty Warrior which reinterprets one of the stories from Black Chameleon is set to debut in Spring 2022 with the Houston Grand Opera. A fellow with The Writer’s Hotel and The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator, D.E.E.P.’s collaborations with The Houston Ballet, The Houston Rockets, and the Houston Grand Opera have opened new doors for performance poetry. The opera, Marian’s Song, for which she wrote the libretto, debuted in 2020 to roaring reviews.
ABOUT THE IMANI SCHOOL
The Imani School is a private, Christian school which offers an excellent education to students from preschool through eighth grade. The Imani School for Infants and Toddlers serves children from 6 weeks to two years old. Our philosophy affirms the global truth that each child is a unique individual created by and in the image of God. The Imani School has rapidly gained a reputation for academic excellence within a supportive, family environment which promotes leadership and self-esteem. Imani is an exciting place to go to school. Students are hard working, enthusiastic and respectful; faculty are caring and challenging; parents are supportive and involved. Smaller classes, individual attention, close student –teacher relationships, a rigorous curriculum and an expectation of excellence all work together to create confident, competent, caring children.
ABOUT THE POWER CENTER
The Power Center is a 21st century service delivery model of private and public partnership. Housed within The Power Center and on its site are a variety of for-profit and non-profit entities and programs with include J.P. Morgan Chase Bank branch, a real estate development company,, a medical clinic, The Woman, Infant, and Children Nutritional program, a pharmacy, and optical center. The Power Center boasts an inventory with 20,000 sq. ft. of event space to fulfill even the most imaginative and creative special occasion needs. The state of the art facility features “break-out” meeting rooms and executive board rooms with leather high back executive swivel chairs, able to seat 10-14 comfortably around an mahogany conference table.
ABOUT THE HOUSTON MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE
The mission of HMAAC is to collect, conserve, explore, interpret, and exhibit the material and intellectual culture of Africans and African Americans in Houston, the state of Texas, the southwest and the African Diaspora for current and future generations. In fulfilling its mission, HMAAC seeks to invite and engage visitors of every race and background and to inspire children of all ages through discovery-driven learning. HMAAC is to be a museum for all people. While our focus is the African American experience, our story informs and includes not only people of color, but people of all colors. As a result, the stories and exhibitions that HMAAC will bring to Texas are about the indisputable fact that while our experience is a unique one, it has been impacted by and has impacted numerous races, genders and ethnicities. The museum continues to be a space where a multicultural conversation on race geared toward a common future takes place.
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