About April plus Madison
Dr. April Lynn James
Award-winning Soprano, Bestselling Author, Wonderland Enthusiast
Affectionately known as The PhDiva, Dr. April is an award-winning soprano with a PhD in Music from Harvard. Her specialties are baroque music, Christmas carols, The Star-Spangled Banner, and Alice in Wonderland.
Dr. April has sung and recorded as a soloist and chorister in Europe and the US. She has appeared at The Brooklyn Museum, NY Symphony Space, Hudson Opera House, and Unity of Fort Myers, among others.
She first experienced the amazing power of the arts to heal body, mind, and soul during her doctoral years, when she healed from stress-induced weight gain, depression, and tendonitis through dance, mime and juggling.
The “Decade of Awfulness” following Harvard propelled her even further down this path when an unplanned viewing of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) introduced her to Lewis Carroll’s works and her guardian angel, Madison Hatta, Sonneteer.
She brings these multiple facets together in her concert, April in Wonderland, and in her course, The ALICE Way: The 5-Step, Wonderland-Inspired Approach to Total Well-Being.
Also a Bestselling Author
Dr. April is also the author of the “delightfully readable” book, The Tenth Muse: How Maria Antonia Advanced the Pastoral Opera, which spent a month at #1 following its debut in August 2023, and went on to become an international best-seller.
“Everybody has won,
and all must have prizes.”
Lewis Carroll
Selected Awards
Gulf Coast Writers Association Non-Fiction Winner
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council & Creative Capital Artist Summer Institute
NY State Alliance for Arts Education & Association of Teaching Artists Grant
Urban Artist Initiative/NYC, Artist Fellowship
Crittenden Opera Studio Grant
Queens Council on the Arts, Individual Artist Grant
Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst/German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Fellowship
Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellowship
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship
Goethe-Institut Mannheim Grant
Jewish Foundation for Education of Women Grant
Madison Hatta, Sonneteer
Dr. April did not create Madison; Madison comes through Dr. April. Madison is the guardian angel of Dr. April's sense of humor.
The "Madisonnets" began flowing through Dr. April in the summer of 2011. She plus Madison now have well over 200 with which to delight the ear, eye, heart, and mind. Madison Hatta's Book of Unreasonable Rhymes is available from Moonstone Press (Philadelphia, PA: 2015)
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