I am foremost a Southerner. I draw my inspiration from the haunting voices that echo across America's only defeated landscape.

The only award I seek is victory crowned by silence, and the hatching of a new world.

William Pleasant was born in the sea island region of Georgia (USA). He comes from an old abolitionist family, and is a descendant of San Francisco's famed Mary Ellen Pleasant-lauded as California's mother of civil rights. While an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, Pleasant began to write short stories and playlets. In 1985, he moved to New York City and began a career as a political journalist. As an editor/essayist, he is best known for STONO (1991-1992), a popular quarterly journal of radical arts and politics that he founded and edited, and THE LAST TEN DAYS, a video documentary selection of the 1989 Berlin Film Festival. He also co-directed the 1989 USA primiere of Heiner Mueller's THE TASK. Pleasant's first full commercial production, FROM GOLD TO PLATINUM, was staged at Manhattan's 2000-seat Symphony Space Theatre in June 1986. Since that time, he has had 13 stagings of his plays in the US, Europe and Africa-including the featured experimental production of the 1991 Vienna Festival (SKINSHOW). Pleasant currently lives and writes in New York City.