Linda Parris-Bailey

Linda Parris-Bailey creates story-based plays  with music focusing on themes of transformation and empowerment. She is  President and CEO of Parris-Bailey Arts, Inc., and former  Executive/Artistic Director of The Carpetbag Theatre, Inc of Knoxville,  TN. During her forty-seven year career as a playwright, she has written  and performed numerous works. Linda is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee,  and recipient of a 2015 Doris Duke Artists Award in Theater. Her award  winning works include, Speed Killed My Cousin and Between A Ballad and A Blues, her ode to Appalachian renaissance man Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong. Her signature work Dark Cowgirls and Prairie Queens continues  to be performed. Linda is a founding member of Alternate Roots and a  Senior Advisor to the Women Playwrights International Conference. Her  works have been published in Alternate Roots: Plays from the Southern  Theater, Ensemble Works, and other anthologies of contemporary plays.  She is currently developing two new works Flushing and Yankee Bajan. Flushing,  an adult puppet piece, is a collaboration with Eric Bass and Ines  Zeller-Bass of Sandglass Theater, directed by Kathie DeNobriga. The  piece centers on generational transitions in leadership, race, and  culture. Yankee Bajan is an  original play which focuses on an African American family's response to  the racism and violence that continues to plague America and their  journey to repatriate to their ancestral home in Barbados.

Linda envisioned the Creative Arts Reintegration (CAR) model, and was a key partner in creating, building and growing our Veteran Arts Program in Tampa, in partnership with The Carpetbag Theatre Inc.