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Samaiya Ewing
Samaiya Ewing grew up in Arizona, and then resettled in Chicago in 2000. She brought with her much experience from repeated wins in Arizona poetry competitions before ever setting foot in Chicago. She has read and performed for such venues in Chicago as Dyke Mic at Bailiwick Theatre, Nina Corwin's Word Gourmet, High Risk Gallery, Scott Free's Grinder serues, and the Feast of Fools. In May 2001, she was co-featured with Tara Betts at Café Aloha. In spring of 2002, Ewing qualified for a slot on the Woodlawn Tap's National Slam team, but technicalities surrounding the team's filing for competition forbade that team from competing in the Nationals. This left Ewing as a free agent, so she competed for the alternate slot on the Green Mill's team and won it. Ewing is outspoken and political about her size, her race, and her lesbianism, and has no qualms about calling herself a "fat, black dyke." Her work concerns body image, racial identity, and sexuality, dealing with these issues singly or in combination. She enjoys applying a kind of cultural parallax to stereotypes. She finds two distinct views that converge on a common issue and plays them off each other through characters who inhabit her narratives; for example, the comments of queer women critique other queer women, and those of blacks critique other blacks. The audience then may see how a stereotype is inconsistent even (and especially) with itself.
- July 2002
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