2018 Award Honorees
Stacey Isom Campbell
On The 8's
Dan I Rodden Jr Play Award
Tammy’s routine as a housewife, mother, and Weather Station watcher, are interrupted when her only daughter leaves for college and finds out that her former lover, punk rock legend Bobby Foster, dies of a drug-overdose. She finds watching the Weather Station is no longer enough to keep the illusion that she’s fulfilled, normal, and happy, so she begins to create the weather in her living room.
Stacey Isom Campbell’s plays include When Mountains Move, The Loophole, On the 8’s, Laundry at the Coin & Spin, Smokin’ Devils, and others. Her work has been seen at The Collective: NY, the Great Plains Theatre Conference, the Barter Theatre, Pittsburgh New Works Festival, L.A. First Stage, EstroGenius Xtended, Red Clay Theatre, and others. She has had plays as semifinalists at The O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference and the Seven Devils Theatre Conference. Her plays have been finalists at the Rose Henley Playwriting Competition and the Playwright’s Theater (Dallas). She is a Fellow of The Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Lee University. To find out more about her work, visit: staceyisomcampbell.com.
2017 Award Honorees
​
Sue Granzella
"When He Was Ten"
Naomi Rodden Essay Award
"When He Was Ten" maps a teacher's thoughts when she finds that a former student has been charged with murder. Granzella captures the unending hope and care of a teacher even when the student moves on.
Sue Granzella is a third-grade public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though she knew at age six that she loved writing, she didn’t begin taking writing classes until age fifty-one. Since then, her writing has been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays, and she has received awards from Memoirs Ink and the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, a contest for which she is now a judge. Sue’s writing appears in Full Grown People, Gravel, Ascent, Citron Review, Hippocampus, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Santa Fe Writers Project, among others. She has recently completed a collection of essays. Sue loves baseball, stand-up comedy, hiking, road trips, and reading the writing of 8- and 9-year-olds. A sampling of her writing can be found at www.suegranzella.com .
Allison Darcy
"Stakes Into Skin"
Jane Egbert Short Story Award
"Stakes Into Skin" tells the story of a woman working to understand her faith, her identity, and her family relationships. Darcy combines the personal and the grand mythic with razor sharp language.
Allison Darcy is a writer and seeker currently at work on an MA in Religion at Duke University. She is grateful to have her stories, essays, and poems published or forthcoming in Jewish Currents, the Jewish Daily Forward, Nat. Brut, Write About Now’s litter, Poetica Magazine, and Vagabond City. She can be found at allisondarcywrites.com and occasionally tweets at @_allisondarcy.
Julia Pascal
Blueprint Medea
Dan I Rodden Jr Play Award
Blueprint Medea connects to the Greek myth but is set in modern London. Inspired by the death in September 2016 of the ‘Kurdish Angelina Jolie’ who was killed by Daesh. It is also sourced by interviews with ex-soldiers in London.
Julia Pascal PhD trained as an actor. As a member of the National Theatre, London, she adapted and directed the writings of Dorothy Parker for a Platform Performance called Men Seldom Make Passes. She was the first woman to direct at the NT. Her playwriting career includes over 15 works which have been seen in the UK, Europe and the USA. The Holocaust Trilogy, Theresa, reveals the collaboration of the Channel Island governments with the Nazis during World War II. Pascal adapted it for the radio in l996 after it won a BBC Alfred Bradley Prize. As The Road to Paradise it was broadcast in 1996 and 1997 and nominated for the Sony Prize.
​
Her plays include, The Dybbuk (inspired by S. Anski’s original) and A Dead Woman on Holiday which were produced in London and on the European mainland over two decades. The Yiddish Queen Lear at Southwark Playhouse. At The Arcola Theatre, she directed her text Woman in the Moon which exposed Wernher von Braun’s space research as having been developed in the German concentration camp Dora as well as her interpretation of The Merchant of Venice entitled The Shylock Play. The Tricycle Theatre commissioned Crossing Jerusalem, her first play about Israel. She directed the second production at the Park Theatre. Honeypot staged at The New Diorama Theatre dramatizes the use of women revenge agents after after the Munich Olympics. Investigating the trauma of former soldiers her 2013 text Nineveh, premiered a Riverside Studios. St Joan which challenges the historical imperative of slavery and Shoah was staged at The Edinburgh Festival and toured internationally. Currently she is researching a new play about Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Salomon when both were imprisoned in Gurs internment camp. Her awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for Science and the Arts. She is published by Oberon Books, Faber and Samuel French (Inc).
