A COMING MARGARET BONDS PREMIERE WORKS TO RIGHT AN OLD NEST OF WRONGS Part 4 of 4: An Illustrated Program Note for Margaret Bonds’s Bitter Laurel [This is the fourth and final installment in a series of posts about the premiere of Margaret Bonds's late musical drama Bitter Laurel . Part I, focusing on the biographical context for the work's creation, is available here . Part II, focusing on Elizabeth Keckley and her connections to Queens University of Charlotte, is here . And

A COMING MARGARET BONDS PREMIERE WORKS TO RIGHT AN OLD NEST OF WRONGS Part 3 of 4 In June 2025, I posted Part 1  and Part 2  of the series that continues here and concludes next weekend – a series of posts that centers on the upcoming premiere of the surviving magnum opus of Margaret Bonds’s late years in California (1967-72). The work in question is the musical Bitter Laurel , a musical-dramatic celebration of the life and legacy of Elizabeth Hobbes Keckley  (1818-1907). I t