Carl Hancock Rux is a writer and multi-disciplinary performing artist, and the author of the Village Voice Literary award winning collection of poetry and prose Pagan Operetta (Fly By Night Press), the novel Asphalt (Simon & Schuster) and the OBIE award winning play, Talk (TCG Press). Rux is a graduate of Columbia University and also attended the American University of Paris and the University of Ghana at Legon. Also a product of the New York City Foster Care system, Rux's published poetry, plays, fiction, and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, internationally. A former resident artist of Mabou Mines and the Ebenezor Experimental Theater in Lulea, Switzerland, Rux has collaborated extensively in non-traditional theater works, writing and performing his text for several dance companies including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Jane Comfort & Co., and Marlies Yearby's Movin' Spirits Dance Theater among others. He has also written and performed his own alternative theater works throughout the U.S., Europe, West Africa, Indonesia and Scandinavia, at numerous venues, and recently toured Europe in the title role of the Robert Wilson/Bernice Johnson Reagon opera, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Mr. Rux is formerly the host and artistic programming director of the WBAI radio show, Live from The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and presently is a contributing correspondant for XM radio's The Bob Edwards Show as well as a frequent guest host on WNYC's Soundcheck. He is recipient of the Bessie Schomburg Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Prize, the NYFA award (Gregory Millard Playwright in Residence Fellow), the National Endowment for the Arts (Theater Communications Group Playwright in Residence Fellow), a Rockefellar Map grant, the Creative Capital Artist Initiative grant, and the Cal Arts/Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Also a recording artist, his critically acclaimed debut CD, Rux Revue (Sony Music), was voted one of the top ten alternative music CD's of 1999 (New York Times), and his sophomore CD release, Apothecary; Rx was recently released on Giant Step Records. In December of 2005, Rux is slated for the New York premiere of his latest work for stage, Mycenean -- an opera oratorio with video installation and live digital music composition, originally commissioned by the Washington Performing Arts Society.