Spoke : A Mother, a Son, Civil Rights, Vietnam

In 1963, Rosalyn Coleman Gilchrist, a white Oklahoma housewife, boarded a bus and rode it across the country to march on Washington. It wasn’t her first civil rights protest. On the bus she agreed to sell her home — in her all-white suburb — to a black doctor. Before the sale went through, the city fathers had her arrested and confined in the state mental hospital. She lost her home, her children, and her freedom. Five years later her youngest son — now facing prison for his own resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War — obtained his mother’s freedom. SPOKE takes readers from the lunch-counter sit-ins of the early 1960s to the draft-board raids later that same decade; from Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington to the 1968 DC Mobilization Against the War; from the nightmarish conditions of mid-century state mental institutions to the soul-less sterility of the federal prison system; from the advent of women’s lib to the dawn of the sexual revolution.

He challenged Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s. He managed Chicago's premiere music venue (Park West) in the 1970s. He headed Chicago's gay men's health clinic (Howard Brown) in the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. He owned a successful software company (The Conference Works) in the 90s. In the early 21st century he built his own outdoor black-box theatre (Alley Stage), where, over five years, he premiered 30 new plays by American playwrights.

Coleman is the author of an award-winning memoir (SPOKE) and more than two dozen plays, including A CONTEST OF WILLS, INFAMOUS MOTHERS, SIN EATER and FAUX POE.

He received a Literary Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Council and is a three-time recipient of an artist-community collaboration grant from the Wisconsin Arts Council. He teaches writing workshops for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a two-time recipient of a Dramatist Guild Foundation grant for his work in producing original plays.

He is a member of the Dramatist Guild of America and Playwrights Ink (Madison). ​