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
one of the most widely-produced playwright/directors
specializing in theatre for inter-generational audiences
in the United States. Ms. Surface's work has been featured
at Seattle Children's Theatre, Dallas Children's Theatre,
Arizona's Childsplay, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, as
well as nine productions at the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C. Touring productions of her plays Most Valuable
Player (about the life of Jackie Robinson), A
Perfect Balance (a fantasy about creativity inspired
by the work of Alexander Calder) and Apollo: to
the Moon (about America's race for space) have
been presented in every region of the US, as well as
in Ireland, France, Peru, Germany, Italy and across
Canada. An anthology of five of her plays, Most
Valuable Player and Four Other All-Star Plays
for Middle and High School Audiences was recently
published by Smith and Kraus. She has been nominated
for four Helen Hays Awards for Outstanding Direction
and received the 2002 Helen Hayes Award for her direction
of Perseus Bayou. She has also been nominated
for the Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New
Play for Sing Down the Moon and Perseus
Bayou. A national leader in her field, she was
the director of New Visions 2000: One Theatre World,
a national festival of theatre for young people and
families, co-produced by the Kennedy Center and ASSITEJ/USA
in May 2000. Her latest plays, A Light in the Storm,
based on the book by Karen Hesse, opened at the Kennedy
Center in October 2001 and Mississippi Pinocchio,
premiered at Theater of the First Amendment in March
2002. She is a 2000 Aurand Harris Fellow of the Children's
Theatre Foundation of America, a National Endowment
for the Arts on-site evaluator and an advisor to American
Theatre Magazine.
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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