RIP Mark Medoff (1940-2019)

Playwright and screenwriter Mark Medoff was giving a presentation in 2017 when someone asked him, “How do you write a screenplay?” Mark replied: “Hands up if you’ve ever watched a film.” Everyone put their hands up. “Then you know how to write a screenplay.” If, in reality, it wasn’t quite that easy, Mark, with his…

RIP Felipe de Ortego y Gasca 1926-2018

Felipe de Ortego y Gasca was a man apart. His life was a picaresque tale – part Charles Dickens, part Great Gatsby. He was orphaned as a child, never graduated from High School but became a university professor, served his country in three conflicts, met James Baldwin and Richard Wright in Paris, published prolifically, acted…

RIP Irina Ratushinskaya 1954-2017

Irina Ratushinskaya, the Soviet dissident poet and novelist, was a legendarily defiant figure. Sentenced in 1983, on her 29th birthday, to seven years in a labor camp for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” she not only survived, but wrote poems on bars of soap with the burnt ends of matchsticks. She memorized and erased them before…

RIP Tom Hayden 1939-2016

On October 23rd we lost writer/activist/politician Tom Hayden. He’d lived a life of service in the pursuit of social justice. Hayden was one of the original Freedom Riders, journeying to the Deep South in 1961 and getting beaten up for his efforts. The following year, while in jail in Georgia, he drafted the Port Huron…