Take You Wherever You Go

April 15, 2018
A Tony Award-winning director pays loving tribute to his grandmother as he covers the broad scope of his life.Leon's Grandma Mamie had a hard life. She raised 13 children and then took in Leon when he was 4 and kept him for four years while his mother found her own way in the world. Prayer and the belief that her children and grandchildren could have a better life than she had had kept Mamie going, and she pushed Leon to always do his best. "[She] put in those endless days of work and effort," writes the author, "and her kids never missed a meal. She led that life, that hard, country life, without the comfort of a partnership and some love coming back." Leon's love and devotion to his grandmother are evident throughout the narrative of his childhood and his rise through the ranks as an actor and director. The author discusses her cooking, her clothing and colorful hats, the way she talked, and how she almost always had visitors and was happy to throw together a meal for them. He shares his personal doubts and fears as he worked first as an actor and then as a director in the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. He also writes about his relationships with women, his professional working relationship with the playwright August Wilson, his endeavors to bring more diversity to the stage, and the founding of his own theater company, Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company. The author, who won a Tony for his direction of A Raisin in the Sun in 2014, shows how the supportive words and actions of his closest family members instilled in him a strong confidence in his ability to dream big and overcome the obstacles in his path.Offering a well-rounded look at his successful life, Leon's memoir is self-reflective and encouraging to those who might harbor self-doubts about their own abilities and pursuits.

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May 14, 2018
Tony Award­–winning director Leon assesses the long journey from his modest Florida upbringing to his professional success, including receiving the best director award for his 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun. Leon was born in Tallahassee in 1956 and raised by his grandmother while his mother worked in St. Petersburg. Among the women who influenced him were his Grandma Mamie, who had a “simple, direct, endearing” approach to life, and Annie Ruth, his conservative Christian mother who gave him a moral compass. Leon graduated from Clark Atlanta University, then attended Southwest University School of Law in L.A., “starting and stopping” his education and doing undercover security work (“snitching on people at various job sites”); he returned to Atlanta jobless, but began focusing on theater. Leon glows when speaking of his time at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater, even if his tenure began by receiving a letter that read, “When we come to the theater, we come to support our own kind. Not some pushy, uppity coon.” Throughout, Leon celebrates the many actors and directors he worked with or admired, including Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson (who contributed the book’s foreword), and his idol, playwright August Wilson, whose Fences he directed on Broadway. Leon delivers revealing personal stories of theatrical success in this uplifting memoir. Agent: Cait Hoyt, Creative Artists Agency.

June 1, 2018
The mother of 13 children who toiled through decades of backbreaking farmwork, Leon's Grandma Mamie was a force to be reckoned with. Leon, a Tony Award-winning director and the first black artistic director of the biggest regional theater in the South, still carries the lessons he learned from Grandma Mamie into his career and life. At four years old, Leon went to live with his grandmother while his mother was trying to start a better life in a new city. Even after he rejoined his family, enduring beatings from his stepfather, being bused to a mostly white high school, and then entering the theater in college, the examples of perseverance and honesty he saw from Grandma Mamie and his mother remained with him. He recalls their teachings, the numerous people he met who added to them, and how he uses them to this day in his work with a beautiful attitude of humility and gratitude. He gracefully shows how he lives his life in answer to the prayers of the generations who came before.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2018

The first African American director to win a Tony Award (for the 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun), Leon here relates his life and the lessons he learned, especially from a strong grandmother who taught him to find his inspiration and let it "take you wherever you go." Insights also on the great playwright August Wilson, whose Fences claimed ten Tony nominations and three Tony wins when Leon directed the 2010 revival.

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