Karlya Shelton, front and center, with the swans, performing George ... became a founding member of the Dance Theater of Harlem, a pioneering Black ballet company conceived in 1969 by the Harlem ...

She joined EW in 2000. She is the author of the books Welcome to Utopia: Notes From a Small Town (2010) and The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their ...