Press Kit

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Media Release for:
Abigail Gray: Living under the Drinking Gourd

As Abigail Gray, an abolitionist farm wife of 1859, Clifton tells the true stories of the Underground Railroad of southeastern Indiana and beyond. These accounts are full of adventure, espionage, intrigue, and danger. They're also sprinkled liberally with humor, as "Abigail" tells of the tricks abolitionists--both black and white--played on the Copperheads and other slave hunters. Audience members quickly understand that they are actors in the drama.

Clifton received a Frank Basile Emerging Stories Fellowship in 2004 to develop Abigail Gray: Living under the Drinking Gourd. Since then, she has performed it at the Indiana History Center, Indiana State Museum, the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, and various libraries, schools, museums, and historical events throughout the state.

Out of her research for Abigail Gray came an idea for a children's novel. Clifton received an Individual Art Project Fellowship through the Indiana Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts to pursue that project.

"The first draft is finished," Clifton says. "Now come the revisions."

Clifton, a writer and full-time English teacher, has told professionally for a quarter of a century, traveling throughout the Midwest and upper South performing her various programs. Learn more by visiting her blog at http://writersharonkirkclifton.blogspot.com/p/storytelling-programs_11.html.

Audience members are invited to take part in a Q & A session following each program, if time allows.