Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery a play

By Shay Youngblood

Adapted from the collection Big Mama Stories, Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery is a coming of age play about a young girl whose community of mothers relive stories about their lives to help usher Daughter into womanhood after her first period the summer she turns twelve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shay Youngblood
• Release date: Feb 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301138289

Shay Youngblood

Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris, Winter Prophet, a graphic novel, Black Power Barbie and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories. Her plays, Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery, and Talking Bones (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Flying Blind, Square Blues and Communism Killed My Dog. An Edward Albee honoree, and the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, several NAACP Theater Awards, and an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction, Ms. Youngblood graduated from Clark-Atlanta University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the eastern Caribbean, as an au pair, artist's model, and poet's helper in Paris, and as a creative writing instructor in a Rhode Island women's prison. She was a 2011 Japan U.S. Friendship Commission, Creative Artist Fellow. Currently she is a writer in residence at the Dallas Museum of Art. "My interest in architecture has been fueled by my travels. I have lived on the East Coast, in the Deep South, Japan, Hawaii, France, Spain and the Caribbean, traveled to Australia, Canada, Mexico, Sweden and Denmark and once took a three month road trip across the United States. I have a particular weakness for shoes and my guilty pleasures are spa vacations and 72 hour reading orgies. I will try almost any cuisine or any activity once, more if I like it. My art practice includes writing and painting, sometimes I combine the two. Among my creative goals are collaborations with a composer on an opera, an illustrator on a graphic novel and to develop an interdisciplinary work for the theater that integrates video animation."

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Reviews for Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery a play

[Ebonie Marie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was honestly one of the best plays I did in college!