PROGRAM NOTE
You! Inez! sets a poem that was handwritten in a notebook in 1921 by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a Harlem Renaissance author and activist. “Her African American, Anglo, Native American, and Creole heritage contributed to her complex understandings of gender, race, and ethnicity, subjects she often addressed in her work.” (Poetry Foundation) Her outspoken courage extends to this private expression of love for another woman, combining images of elemental forces—light, color, fire, flashes—to describe the magnificent “world of love” she felt she could not share publicly, but cherished in her diaries.