On Thursday, April 30, 2026, the group Fordham Reads Dante—which, for the past ten years, has met several times a year to read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy one or canto at a time—held a 10th anniversary event run by Fordham’s Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. The event hosted an abridged performance of the two-person play Hell Has an Exit based on the life experiences of, and performed by the musician BL Shirelle and her mother Debra Taylor, a poet and preacher. The play was performed in the beautiful Tognino Hall of Duane Library and was introduced by speakers Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Susana Barsella, the founders of Fordham Reads Dante.
The final speaker to introduce the play was Ron Jenkins, a theater professor at Yale, who scripted the play based on interviews with Shirelle and Taylor. Since 2010, Jenkins has run theater workshops with incarcerated people exploring Dante’s poem and its themes of redemption. The play is an expression of this same mission to share Dante and the spiritual inspiration his work provides. The play’s title takes after this, as the titular protagonist of the Divine Comedy experiences the depths of hell before ultimately rising up to heaven. The play passionately narrates through prose and song the fraught life lows and recovery of Shirelle and Taylor. Even the prose elements of the play are rather poetic, intertwining quotations from Dante and recontextualizing his florid, ecstatic descriptions in the light of Shirelle and Taylor’s struggles and continued perseverance.
The performance itself was impassioned and well-structured. It is framed as a conversation between Shirelle and Taylor, in which they tell each other and the audience stories of their past rooted in their understandings of Dante’s message and words. The play passes from prose (incorporating Dante’s poetry) to hip-hop, gospel music, and song set to guitar, concluding with a powerful rap piece on spiritual themes titled “ ‘Till I go” that Shirelle originally wrote at the age of 14 and a sermon-style monologue by Taylor. After the performance, Shirelle, Taylor, and Jenkins accepted questions from the audience before refreshments were provided for a continued informal chat.
This event was co-sponsored by the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, the Department of Languages and Cultures, and the Center for Medieval Studies.
