Memphis native and playwright Katori Hall is the winner of the 2010 William Inge Theatre Festival's Otis Guernsey New Voices in the American Theatre Award.

She is the first African-American playwright to receive the New Voices honor.

A 2003 graduate of Columbia University and the 1999 valedictorian of Craigmont High School, Hall's first New York production was "Hoodoo Love" in 2007 at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Last summer, her play, "The Mountaintop," about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last night in the Lorraine Motel, debuted in London to critical acclaim.

Memphis, and its array of colorful characters, feature prominently in her work. "Hoodoo Love" was set just outside the city, and another play, "Hurt Village," was set in a local housing project.

The 29th annual William Inge Theatre Festival will be April 21-24 in Independence, Kan., where Hall will receive an honorarium and a staged reading of one of her new plays.

-- Christopher Blank

Memphis artist shows painting in Chicago

A new Chicago exhibition includes the work of Memphis painter Rollin Kocsis.

Titled "Connect," the painting is part of a group show, "We Are Connected," that opened Friday and runs through Feb. 25 at Murphy Hill Gallery in the Windy City. Conceived as both a 9/11 commemoration and a celebration of human connections, the exhibit features more than 50 traditional and digital artists tied to co-curator Giorgio Vaselli's "Energy Art Movement," which he formed in 2008.

The "Energy Art Movement" is a collective of like-minded artists who focus on "vitality, energy and movement in art," Kocsis said. The painter, who will attend today's opening reception in Chicago, recently finished a solo show at Gallery Fifty Six in Cooper-Young and will next display his work locally, he said, at the Germantown Performing Arts Centre in April. For more information, visit murphyhillgallery.com or energyartmovement.org.

-- Bill Ellis

Make a 'Prom' date

"Prom Night in Mississippi," the award-winning documentary about the first racially integrated senior prom in Charleston, Miss., arrives on DVD on Jan. 26 on the Docurama Films label.

Directed by Paul Saltzman, the movie chronicles the 2008 effort to host a single senior dance, ending an almost four-decade tradition of separate "white" and "black" proms. The effort was galvanized by Charleston's most famous resident, actor Morgan Freeman, who agreed to finance the prom.

The movie screened at the 2009 On Location: Memphis International Film Fest, and won the Audience Award at last year's Oxford Film Festival.

The DVD features deleted and extended scenes and other bonuses.

-- John Beifuss