Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright and performance artist. She has developed her own form of one-person shows, described as 'a voice' formed from the 'juxtaposition of other voices', in which she plays a panoply of characters based on interviews with these people. In Smith's Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and other Identities and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 , she embodies a broad range of perspectives that revolve around the ignitable crux of race and class. She is the Ann O'Day Maples Professor of the Arts at Stanford University.