about the authors
 CALLEEN SINNETTE JENNINGS (playwright)
is author of over 70 plays for adults and children.
She is a winner of the 2002 Heideman Award from the
Actors' Theatre of Louisville. Her play Inns and
Outs was a 1999 recipient of a $10,000 grant from
the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, and
premiered at Washington D.C.'s Source Theatre. Her play,
Playing Juliet/Casting Othello premiered at
the Folger Elizabethan Theatre in 1998. Dramatic Publishing
has published both plays, along with Sunday Dinner,
and Free Like Br'er Rabbit (produced by Imagination
Stage and featured at the 2000 New Visions/One World
International Children's Festival). Her plays Same
But Different and A Lunch Line are published
by New Plays, Inc. In 2002, Ms. Jennings was commissioned
by Arena Stage to create Darker Circles, a
new play for its District Views reading series. Ms.
Jennings was also commissioned by the Bethesda Academy
of Performing Arts to create two plays for its Wings
Access-Ability performing company. Two of the plays,
Ascension and Working Wings have been
performed on Capitol Hill for members of Congress who
work with disability advocacy. Ms. Jennings is a Professor
of Theatre, and Director of the Theatre/Music Theatre
Program at American University in Washington, DC. She
is a member of the acting faculty for the Folger Library's
Teaching Shakespeare Institute. She is a two-time recipient
of a meritorious directing award from the Kennedy Center
American College Theatre Festival, and she is a two-time
Helen Hayes Award nominee for the Charles MacArthur
Award for Outstanding New Play.
 MARY HALL SURFACE (playwright) is an internationally-recognized playwright and director specializing in theatre for families. A member of the Washington, DC theatre community since 1989, she has had twelve productions at the Kennedy Center as well as at Arena Stage, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, the National Gallery of Art and three projects with the National Symphony Orchestra. Internationally her work has been featured in productions and festivals in Germany, Canada, Japan, Peru, France, Taiwan, Sweden and Ireland. She has been nominated for five Helen Hays Awards for Outstanding Direction (receiving the 2002 award for Theatre of the First Amendment's Perseus Bayou) and for four Charles MacArthur Awards for Outstanding New Play. Her plays are published by Dramatic Publishing, Anchorage Press and Samuel French, and original cast albums of her musicals have received Gold and Silver Parents' Choice Awards. Smith and Kraus has published an anthology of five of her plays as well as two collections of scenes and monologues. She has served on the board of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Youth, as the producer of a National Festival of American Theatre for Families at the Kennedy Center, as a National Endowment for the Arts on-site evaluator and theater panelist, and is the 2006 recipient of a lifetime achievement award for her playwriting from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. Ms Surface resides in Washington with actor/sculptor Kevin Reese and their daughter Malinda.
ERIC WILSON (playwright) received
the Kennedy Center's Lorraine Hansberry Playwrights
Award through the American College Theatre Festival
for Strands. Other plays include adaptations of Patricia
and Frederick McKissack's A Long Hard Journey
and Deborah Hopkinson's Sweet Clara and the Freedom
Quilt. Mr. Wilson works extensively with St. Louis's
Historyonics Theatre Company and the Missouri Historical
Society. With the MUNY Student Theatre, Mr. Wilson created
Solid Gold, a musical which was featured at
the Kennedy Center's New Visions, New Voices Theatrical
Conference.
DEBORAH WICKS LA PUMA (music)
- see her bio page
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