A Duet for Water

Naomi Wallace is a poet and playwright from Prospect, Kentucky. Wallace was a 1999 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the grant popularly known as the genius award. Her plays include: In The Heart of America, One Flea Spare, Slaughter City, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Jumper (with Bruce McLeod), The War Boys, Things of Dry Hours, Birdy (an adaptation of William Wharton's novel), and The Fever Chart: three short visions of the Middle East. Her plays are published by Faber and Faber in London, and Theater Communications Group and Broadway Play Publishing Inc. in the United States.

Wallace obtained her Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College and did graduate studies at the University of Iowa. Wallace's work has been produced in both the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. Her work has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award and an Obie. She is a dedicated advocate for justice, human rights, and Palestinian rights in the Middle East. Her award-winning film Lawn Dogs is available on DVD. Her film, The War Boys, co-written with Bruce McLeod, will be available in 2008.

Milk and Water

Tina Howe’s respected career has garnered her two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, a Tony nomination and numerous other accolades. Howe’s works are renowned for use of lyrical language that discovers drama in the most unlikely of places. Her plays contemplate the span of emotions, from romance and death, to family, art, and the very essence of life. Howe earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1984 for Painting Churches—about the decline of an old-money family—and in 1997 for Pride's Crossing, concerning an elderly woman looking on her past. Coastal Disturbances, starring Annette Benning and Timothy Daly on Broadway, garnered her a Tony nomination for Best Play in 1988. Additional works by Howe include The Nest, Birth and after Birth, Museum, The Art of Dining, Approaching Zanzibar, One Shoe Off, and Rembrandt’s Gift. These and other works have premiered at the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, the Old Globe Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, and The Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Among her many awards are an Obie for distinguished playwriting, an Outer Circle Critics Award, a Rockefeller grant, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, an American Theatre Wing Award, the Sidney Kingsley Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and two honorary degrees. Howe has been a visiting professor at Hunter College since 1990, has taught master classes at NYU, UCLA, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon and has served on the council of the Dramatists Guild since 1990.

The Rudy
Francesca Sanders, IN 10 Competition Winner, is an award winning playwright who hails from Portland, Oregon. Since she began writing in 2000, she has been the recipient of The Oregon Literary Fellowship for Drama, the Portland Civic Theatre Guild Fellowship for Theatrical Excellence, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Playwriting Grant, a Women’s Work Residency at New Perspectives Theatre, New York; and commissions from Portland Center Stage and Integrity Productions. She has also been selected to participate in the Seven Devil’s Playwriting Conference.

Sanders has been a finalist for the Rosenthal New Play Prize, Seattle Rep’s New Work Festival, Ojai Playwriting Festival, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, JAW (just add water/West,) New Harmony Project, Play Labs (Playwright’s Center Minneapolis) and has had readings or productions from Bangalore, India to North Dakota.

“The juggling that Sanders does with reality and illusion is deft and skillful. A terrific piece of theatrical writing….A captivating new play.” —NYTheatre.com

“A very talented playwright” —The Oregonian

Markers
Shirley King, IN 10 Finalist, is an award winning playwright who lives in Benicia, California. Her first play won a 2001 California Arts Council competition for best new play. Others works have been staged by Chicago Women's Theater Alliance, Radiant Theatre, Penobscot Theatre, Big Idea Theatre, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Ashland Short Play Festival, SlamBoston, University of North Dakota, Stockyards Theatre Project, Asphalt Jungle Shorts, and Short Leaps Festival, Eureka Theatre, San Francisco.