Sandra Seaton is an award-winning playwright and librettist whose acclaimed works have premiered at major venues including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and LA Opera. She is best known for “From the Diary of Sally Hemings,” set to music by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer William Bolcom and her recent Pulitzer-nominated “Dreamland: Tulsa 1921,” a “ploratorio” created with composer Marques L.A. Garrett. Her solo play “Sally,” about Sally Hemings, will be part of the Wharton Center’s Performing Arts Series in February 2026.
When my husband James and I and our two children arrived in East Lansing in 1971 for his first teaching job out of grad school, it wasn’t the campus we know today. Basketball was at Jenison. Downtown featured two movie houses, a hardware store and the beloved Jacobson’s. We moved into the Cherry Lane Apartments, known then as the Faculty Bricks, and got to know families from all over the world; plant pathology and animal science were two of the main faculty specialties in the apartments. We still stay in touch with some of the young assistant professors we met there.
About six months later, I started working half-time as a no-preference advisor in UUD, aka the Undergraduate University Division. And it was so convenient, right across the street from Cherry Lane Apartments in Wonders Hall. James was teaching humanities in that same dorm, his office and classrooms all in one space.
When the kids were a little older — by that time we had four — I started taking courses at Michigan State University, all the while working as an academic advisor and temping at Kelley Services. I started out as a studio art/pre-architecture major, kept crayons and drawing paper on the floor to keep my kids busy while I finished assignments, a scenario familiar to many current graduate students.
My studio art/pre-architecture major was short-lived. I didn’t have the resources to pursue a degree in architecture, so I used my earlier work in creative writing as an undergrad to pursue a master’s degree in that same area. There’s always a Plan B! As I dedicated myself to my graduate courses in fiction writing, playwriting and literature, with the support of wonderful mentors in MSU’s English department, I found myself listening to the hopes and dreams of the undergraduate students that sought me out as an advisor.
Even as I struggled with the challenges related to my own educational and career goals, I found myself becoming a participant in the journeys of a wide array of students pursuing their own goals. Encouraging them on a daily basis meant a great deal to me.
Some of those students battled emotional problems, others had to contend with the challenges of acclimating themselves to a new culture while others, not unlike myself, were balancing the responsibilities of raising children and pursuing degrees at the same time.
Shortly after I finished by master’s, I was hired to teach creative writing and African American literature at Central Michigan University. My play, “The Bridge Party,” a part of my MA thesis, went on to win a Theodore Ward Prize for African American Playwrights and was performed at the Arthur Miller Theatre, starring Ruby Dee, in 1998. And in 2000, MSU’s Arena Theater hosted a full production of “The Bridge Party” with Adilah Barnes, an actor well known for her role as Roseanne’s friend in the ABC show by the same name.
If I can give any advice to writers, it would be revise, revise, revise. By now I have revised “The Bridge Party” about 20 times. It will undergo another revision this year when it morphs into a play with music by composer Carlos Simon.
For all my years at CMU, I commuted to Mount Pleasant, taught there and wrote for the stage and opera. In addition to writing plays, I have also written librettos, texts to be set to music by composers for operas.
When I reflect on my experiences as an advisor and graduate student at MSU, I can see how interfused they are with my work as a writer and all the ways those experiences prepared me for my career as an English professor at CMU.
My students and I brought our differences to the table; nevertheless, we all had our own hopes, dreams, passions as well as our own personal hurdles and difficulties. None of the students I advised were cardboard cutouts and, hopefully, neither am I or any of my own characters who demand to live on the page.