The St. Louis Black Repertory Company will celebrate International Black Theatre Day with a panel discussion on “Amiri Baraka’s Blues People at 60.”

Featured speaker will be activist poet, novelist, essayist and producer Michael Simanga, professor of Africana studies and history at Morehouse College and guest editor of The Black Scholar. Other panelists will include WashU’s Julius B. Fleming, associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences, and Paige McGinley, associate professor of Performing Arts in Arts & Sciences. Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts & Sciences, will moderate.

Also featured will be an excerpt performance from Sheldon Epps’ “Blues in the Night,” which The Black Rep is staging through Sept. 22 in WashU’s Edison Theatre.

The event is cosponsored by English and Performing Arts as well as the Department of African and African American Studies in Arts & Sciences and the American Culture Studies Program in Arts & Sciences.

Black Theatre Day celebrates the enduring legacy of the African Grove Theatre — the first known professional Black theatre in the United States, founded in New York City in 1821 — as well as the vitality and vibrancy of Black theatre institutions in the United States and around the world.