Ann Eskridge
Novelist, Playwright, Educator

Ann E. Eskridge, the founding member of Detroit’s  Extra Mile Playwrights Theatre, is a 2021 Kresge Fellow. She received the Black Metropolitan Research Consortium Fellowship and participated in Brazil's Fulbright Hays Group Project Abroad program. Her writing covers various topics, including the Underground Railroad, all-black towns in Oklahoma, New Orleans’ free people of color, the Gullah community on the Sea Islands, and Chicago’s black tin pan alley.

 

Eskridge's screenplay, Brother Future, was made into a PBS Wonderworks movie, which won several awards. She also wrote a book and play called The Sanctuary, Cobblehill, 1994, which was optioned by Producer Bill Blinn (Fame) and Sundance. Two monologues from The Sanctuary are included in Childsplay, an anthology of children’s play monologues. The play was also the basis for a Detroit children’s grief and bereavement program.

 

Eskridge has written three musicals: Satin Doll, a reinterpretation of Pygmalion from a black perspective; Echoes Across the Prairie, about the founding of a fictional all-black town in Oklahoma; and The Chicken Never Crossed, about the impact of Detroit’s urban renewal on Hastings Street, Detroit’s Black mecca. The Chicken Never Crossed won the Musical Theatre category at the 2022 Obsidian Theatre Festival.

 

Her play If Pekin is a Duck, Why am I in Chicago?, explores the history of the first black musical theater in the country: The Pekin. Pekin premiered in January 2023 at Playhouse on the Square in Memphis, Tenn.