Alice Childress
Alice Childress was an American playwright, actor, and author, acknowledged as the only AfricanAmerican woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades. Childress described her writing as trying to portray the havenots in a have society, saying My writing attempts to interpret the ordinary because they are not ordinary Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne. Childress also became involved in social causes, and formed an offBroadway union for actors.
Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, but at the age of nine, after her parents separated, she moved to Harlem where she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Though her grandmother had no formal education, she encouraged Alice to pursue her talents in reading and writing. Alice attended public school in New York for her middle school education and went on to Wadleigh High School, but had to drop out once her grandmother died. She became involved in theater immediately after her high school and she did not attend college.
Source: Wikipedia