MIAMI — Two Miami-Dade County residents and a youth football sports team were honored at the Feb. 4 Board of County Commissioners meeting. Commissioner Jean Monestime presented a proclamation to award-winning Miami playwright and actor Tarrel McCraney and the Gwen Cherry Bulls youth football team, as well as a congratulatory certificate to teen student athlete Lexington “Flex” Joseph.
McCraney’s inventive adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which is set in pre-revolutionary Haiti, is currently playing at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach. An ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, McCraney was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013 and was an international writer in residence for the Royal Shakespeare Company and a Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for Arts at Princeton. He attended the New World School of the Arts and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from DePaul University and Master of Fine Arts from Yale University.
Lexington was the only seventh grader to represent Miami-Dade County and one of only three seventh graders to represent Florida in the annual Eastbay Youth All-American Bowl on Sunday, Jan. 5 in San Antonio, Texas. Only the nation’s top 48 youth football athletes spanning three age groups received the invitation to take the field in San Antonio to participate in the game. Lexington plays for Northside Optimist Club and is a student at Horace Mann Middle School with a 3.0 GPA.
Lexington has set his sights on becoming an astronaut.
The third honoree is the Gwen Cherry Bulls, who won the 2013 Pop Warner Jr. Pee Wee (105 lbs) national champion football title. Under the supervision of Boys & Girls Club on-site director O.J. Miller and Coach Javon Ferguson, the team went undefeated with a record 14-0-1 on the road to the title.
No Comment