Kenneth F. Hoke-Witherspoon collection

Kenneth F. Hoke-Witherspoon (b. 1951) is an American playwright that was born in Baltimore, Maryland to a father who was a brickmaker and a mother who worked as a domestic employee. Hoke-Witherspoon was awarded a scholarship to the Northfield Mount Hermon School — a preparatory school in Northfield, Massachusetts — and was later one of the first African-American male freshmen to attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. While at Vassar, Hoke-Witherspoon majored in Psychology but was also extensively involved with theater. He held a variety of jobs in fields such as special education, crisis intervention and working with abused children. He was also a senior research specialist at the Welch Medical Library of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Hoke-Witherspoon wrote ten plays in five years before entering the Catholic University of America’s graduate program in playwriting in 1983. After receiving his Master’s degree in 1987, Hoke-Witherspoon spent time volunteering as Playwright-In-The-School for the Young People’s Theater of the Baltimore Center Stage. The Baltimore Playwrights Festival produced two of his plays: Last Night at Ace High (1988) and All Partial Evil, Universal Good (1989). Subjects of his plays range from the effects of the Vietnam War on the African-American community to the civil rights sit-ins in Baltimore in the 1950s to abortion. He frequently employed Baltimore as a setting for his plays.