CREATORS

The CREATORS

MARK CAMPBELL (Librettist, A Thousand Acres) is a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning librettist/lyricist who is at the forefront of the contemporary opera scene in this country. Mark has written 40 opera librettos, lyrics for 7 musicals and text for 7 song cycles and 4 oratorios. His works include Silent Night, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, As One, The Shining, Elizabeth Cree, Sanctuary Road, Stonewall, Later the Same Evening, The Nefarious, Immoral but Highly Profitable Enterprise of Mr. Burke & Mr. Hare, Volpone, Rappahannock County, The Manchurian Candidate, Volpone, Bastianello/Lucrezia, Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World, The Secret River, and Songs from an Unmade Bed. Other awards include: the first Kleban Foundation Award for Lyricist, two Richard Rodgers Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three Drama Desk nominations, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, and the first Dominic J. Pelliciotti Award.

Campbell is involved in the training of future generations of librettists and composers and serves as mentor with the American Opera Project and American Lyric Theater. In 2020 he also created and funded the first award for librettists in the history of opera: the annual Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. He also recently co-created the True Voice Award to help with the training of transgender opera singers. Upcoming premieres include: Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera), A Sweet Silence in Cremona (Center for Contemporary Opera/Villa la Pietra–Continuum Theater, Florence), Supermax (Long Beach Opera), A Nation of Others (Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall), A Year to the Day (The Violin Channel), Irena (Poznań Teatr Muzyczny) and Émigré (Shanghai Symphony Orchestra).

DAMIEN GETER (Composer, American Apollo) infuses classical music with various styles from the Black diaspora to create music that furthers the cause for social justice. In 2022 Geter has six premieres. His large work, An African American Requiem, premiered in Spring 2022 in partnership with Resonance Ensemble and the Oregon Symphony with subsequent performances at the Kennedy Center. I Said What I Said for Imani Winds, co-commissioned by Anima Mundi Productions, Chamber Music Northwest, and The Oregon Bach Festival, will premiere in 2022 as well, in addition to his one-act opera Holy Ground for Glimmerglass Opera in July 2022. Also premiering in July 2022, is his piece Elegy for American Guild of Organists, his piece The Bronze Legacy for Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the chamber version of American Apollo for Des Moines Metro Opera. Future commissions include premieres at Seattle Opera and Emmanuel Music and World Premiere full operatic productions in 2024, 2025, and 2026 at Des Moines Metro Opera, Seattle Opera, Virginia Opera, InSeries Opera and Portland Opera.

Also an operatic bass-baritone, Geter made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the Grammy award-winning production of Porgy and Bess as the Undertaker. This season Geter will sing the title role of Quamino in the world premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s Quamino’s Map with Chicago Opera Theatre, Angelotti in Tosca with Portland Opera, Sam in Reno Symphony’s Voices of a Nation: Trouble in Tahiti, William Still in Sanctuary Road with the Oakland Symphony, and the bass soloist in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for the Richmond Symphony. Future engagements include Archibald Craven in The Secret Garden with Hawaii Opera Theatre and a Holiday Favorites concert with Symphony Tacoma.

KRISTIN KUSTER (Composer, A Thousand Acres) “writes commandingly for the orchestra,” and her music “has an invitingly tart edge” (The New York Times). Her colorfully enthralling, lush and visceral compositions take inspiration from architectural space, the weather and mythology. Based in Ann Arbor, Kuster is an associate professor and chair of composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance.

Recently she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant for female composers, made possible through The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Upcoming and recent premieres of Kristin’s music include works for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the United States Air Force Heritage Brass Ensemble, Philadelphia-based Network for New Music, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra and the Lisbon Summerfest Chamber Choir. Her music has received support from such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sons of Norway, American Composers Orchestra, League of American Orchestras, New Music USA, American Opera Projects, the Jerome Foundation, and the Jack L. Adams Foundation.

LILA PALMER (Librettist, American Apollo) is a librettist whose warmth, clarity and stylistic flexibility have made her a favored partner of established and emerging composers alike. Upcoming performances in 2022 include the pandemic-rescheduled In Her Own Valley with Grace Mason (Liverpool Philharmonic); Holy Ground with Damien Geter for Glimmerglass Opera and the live performance premiere of the short chamber American Apollo for Des Moines Metro Opera. Palmer’s song cycle for soprano Golda Schultz, This Be Her Verse, hailed as “a new repertoire staple” (Opera News), is out on Alpha Classics and touring Europe. Palmer will attend the 2022 Aix-En-Provence Women’s Opera Lab. Future works coming in 2023 and 2024 include her children’s opera with Clarice Assad, The Selfish Giant (Opera Saratoga); Shell Shaker with Jerod Impichchaachaaha Tate; Splintered, a choose-your-own-adventure Nutcracker fantasia with Jorge Sosa and Justine Chen and the extended-commission full-length American Apollo.

Palmer is an alumna of ALT’s CLDP, where she is Associate Director for Partnerships and Promotions following a year as Interim Managing Director. As well as supporting Artist Development at ALT, she serves as Artist Leader/ Dramaturgy Mentor in new works development for Boston Opera Collaborative and Loose Tea Music Theater, Canada.

NATHANIEL SILVER (Curator and Guest Lecturer, American Apollo) is the William and Lia Poorvu Division Head and Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where he oversees the Collections, Conservation, and Archives departments. He has organized many exhibitions including most recently, Titian: Women, Myth and Power, a collaboration between the Gardner, the Museo del Prado and the National Gallery, London. Silver holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art and has received awards for his work from various institutions.

JANE SMILEY (Author, A Thousand Acres) is an American novelist known for her lyrical works that center on families in pastoral settings. Smiley studied literature at Vassar College (B.A., 1971) and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1975; M.F.A., 1976; Ph.D., 1978). From 1981 to 1996 she was a professor of English at Iowa State University. She subsequently turned to writing full-time.

Her first novel, Barn Blind (1980), focuses on the relationships between a mother and her children. Duplicate Keys, a mystery novel, appeared in 1984. The Greenlanders (1988) is a sweeping epic centered on a 14th-century family, the Gunnarssons. A Thousand Acres (1991; film 1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize, is Smiley’s best-known novel. Modeled on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, it focuses on the Cook family and farm life in Iowa in the 1980s. Smiley’s subsequent novels included Moo (1995), a satire of academia; Horse Heaven (2000), about horse racing; Ten Days in the Hills (2007), a reworking of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron set in Hollywood; and Private Life (2010), which examines a woman’s marriage and interior life. Some Luck (2014), which covers 33 years in the history of the Langdons, a farming family, was the first entry in a trilogy. Early Warning and Golden Age (both 2015), the second and third volumes, were similarly expansive narratives about subsequent generations of the Langdon clan. In 2020 Smiley published the lighthearted Perestroika in Paris, about a racehorse that wanders the French city, making a number of animal friends. She also wrote The Georges and the Jewels (2009), a young adult novel.

Among Smiley’s nonfiction works are a biography of Charles Dickens (2002) and A Year at the Races (2004), a memoir of her experiences as a racehorse owner. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) is a highly personal study of the form and function of the novel. Smiley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. In 2006 she won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.