Adapted for the stage by Phoebe Hall, associate professor and director of theater, this year's program celebrates the lives and deaths of four young girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s subsequent involvement in furthering the Civil Rights movement as a result of that event. The annual celebration is once again based on an award-winning book by noted author and FSU faculty member, Carole Boston Weatherford. The book, titled Birmingham, 1963, was published in 2007 and won the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award from Pennsylvania Center for the Book, the Jefferson Cup from Virginia Library Association, and the Jane Addams Children's Literature Honor from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The publisher, Boyds Mills Press, granted permission for FSU to perform a multimedia production based on the book.

Weatherford has published 32 books, including Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, winner of an NAACP Image Award, Caldecott Honor Medal and Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration. Birmingham, 1963 won the Jefferson Cup, Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, Jane Addams Children's Literature Honor, and the Lion and the Unicorn Honor for Excellence in North American Poetry. Winner of the North Carolina Juvenile Literature Award, the Carter G. Woodson Award from National Council for the Social Studies, and the Ragan-Rubin Award from the North Carolina English Teachers Association, Weatherford has taught at FSU since 2002. Her latest release, Becoming Billie Holiday, is a fictional verse memoir for teens and adults. A Baltimore native, she earned advanced degrees from the University of Baltimore and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

The program will also feature soprano Luvada Harrison as guest soloist. Harrison has performed with the New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Opera Ebony and the Florentine, Jacksonville, New York Verismo and Baltimore Opera companies. Her operatic repertoire includes Serena and Clara in Porgy and Bess, the Countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, Mrs. Johnson in Frederick Douglass, Fiordiligi in Cosi fan Tutte, Suor Angelica in Suor Angelica, Mimi in La Boheme, Rosalinda in Die Fledermaus, First and Second Lady in Magic Flute, Herzogin in Doktor Faust, Leonora in Il Trovatore and Maddelena in Andrea Chenier. She made her Carnegie Hall debut with the Manhattan Philharmonic in the role of the Nurse in Tanayev's Romeo and Juliet, and her Lincoln Center debut in Alice Tully Hall with the New York Choral Society. She was the soprano soloist in Rossini's Stabat Mater. Orchestral and Oratorio repertoire include: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Missa Solemnis, Honneger's King David, Handel's Messiah, Mendelssohn's Elijah, Nielsen's Symphony Espansiva, Rossini's Stabat Mater and the Brahms, Dvorak, Mozart and Verdi Requiems.

Harrison worked for a number of years as an artist-in-residence with the Education Department of the New City Opera, preparing high school students to experience their first opera performance. Other arts in education performances include work for both the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the "Meet the Artist" series at the Lincoln Center.

Off-Broadway patrons enjoyed her performances as the soloist in Prelude and Liebstod by Tony Award winner Terrence McNally. Ms. Harrison also enjoyed broad career exposure when television audiences saw her performance as Aida in the 'Drama Queens' episode on HBO's unqualified smash hit Sex and the City. She currently serves as an assistant professor of music at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Other performances will be by the FSU Concert Choir, under the direction of Ms. Denise Payton; the FSU Dance Troupe, under the direction of Ms. Avis Hatcher-Puzzo; and readers from the FSU Theatre Company, under the direction of Phoebe Hall. Piano accompanist will be Dr. Howard Kim. Also scheduled to participate will be the Heritage Restoration Chorale.

For more information, please call (910) 672-1474.