Meet Our 2021 Nominees

Ramón Esquivel is a playwright, director, dramaturg, and professor. Recent highlights: premieres of The Hero Twins: Blood Race at University of Texas at Austin and Appalachian State University, and Above Between Below at Seattle Children’s Theatre; staged readings of ¡O Cascadia! at Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, and Dulce at Austin Latino New Play Festival. His play The Shahrazad Society won the Aurand Harris Memorial Playwriting Award from New England Theatre Conference. He has published three plays through Dramatic Publishing: Luna, Nasty, and Nocturnal. Ramón is currently Assistant Professor of Theatre – Playwriting at Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo.

Megan is a multi-ethnic Filipina-Canadian playwright, performer, and teacher. Her work has been developed by Salvage Vanguard Theater, Tofte Lake Center, Paper Chairs, The Workshop Theater, and Egg and Spoon Theatre Collective, among others. She is a James A. Michener Fellow, Kundiman Fiction Fellow, Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, Seattle Public Theater Emerald Prize finalist, a Playwrights’ Realm Scratchpad Series semi-finalist, and an Emory University Playwriting Fellowship finalist. Megan earned her MFA in Playwriting and Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX. She is currently a visiting faculty member in playwriting at Bennington College.

Sun Mee Chomet is a Twin-Cities based playwright and performer. Her work has been produced/presented by Guthrie Theater, Theater Mu, Asian Arts Initiative (PA), and Post Theater (Seoul, Korea). Sun Mee’s recognition includes Minneapolis Star Tribune’s ‘Best of’ lists for both The Origin(s) Project and Asiamnesia; “Best Solo Performance” honors for How to Be a Korean Woman (Lavender Magazine); and publication in in the anthology, Asian American Plays for a New Generation. She is grateful for the support of her work by the Jerome Foundation, Knight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, , Minnesota Regional Arts Council, and Rimon Foundation. Sun Mee’s performance accolades include 2019 and 2013 Playwrights’ Center McKnight Theater Artist Fellowships, 2019 Decades Awards (Minneapolis Star Tribune & City Pages), 2015 Lucille Lortel nomination (brownsville song), and 2013 TCG Fox Fellowship.

Noelle Viñas is a playwright, educator, and theater-artist from Springfield, Virginia and Montevideo, Uruguay. Her play Derecho (2019 John Gassner Playwriting Award) was workshopped as part of the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Recent commissions include Zoom Intervention, a short play for Weston Playhouse, Every Time I Feel The Spirit for Shotgun Players, and the book for The Long Horizon, a space musical for Imagination Stage’s Speak Out Onstage Ensemble. Previously, she was part of Playwrights Foundation’s four-year Resident Playwrights Initiative and a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. This spring she will be graduating with her MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. Viñas resides in Brooklyn, where she is a resident artist at Colt Coeur and a proud member of the NYC Latinx Playwrights Circle.

Playwright, poet, and educator Candrice Jones is from Dermott, Arkansas. Candrice’s writes love letters for and to women of the American South. Candrice is a VONA Playwriting alum and CalArts Critical Studies MFA recipient. She is the author of the full-length play, Crackbaby (2010 Wasserstein Prize Nomination) and FLEX (developed at the 2020 Humana Festival of New American Plays). She has been a resident fellow at Ground Floor housed by the Berkeley Rep, the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, and MacDowell’s Colony of the Arts. She is scheduled to be a resident playwright at Djerassi’s Colony of the Arts in the fall of 2020. Candrice, lives and works in Minneapolis where she has received a 2019-20 Many Voices Fellowship and a 2020-21 Jerome Fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center. Candrice Jones, author of FLEX and Crackbaby, is a current Jerome Fellow. Her plays have been developed at VONA, Ground Floor, the Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival, and the Humana Festival of New American Plays. Recently, her plays have received readings from Theatrical Outfit, National New Play Network, and San Francisco Playhouse. She was recently awarded commissions via People’s Light Theater and Actors Theater of Louisville. She is currently developing her play, A Medusa Thread, in UC Santa Barbara’s Launchpad Series.

Franky D. Gonzalez is a playwright and TV writer of Colombian descent based in Dallas, Texas. Franky was a recipient of the 2020 Charles Rowan Beye New Play Commission, co-recipient for the 2018 MetLife Nuestras Voces Latino Playwriting Award, he won the 2020 Crossroads Project Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative Award, the Short+Sweet Theatre Festival Manila Best Overall Production Prize, and was a staff writer for the fourth season of 13 Reasons Why. His work has been read or seen at The Lark, Sundance Institute, Goodman Theatre’s Live@Five Series, HBMG Foundation’s National Winter Playwrights Retreat, The New Harmony Project, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Bishop Arts Theatre Center, Repertorio Español, LAByrinth Theater Company, Dallas Theater Center, Austin Latinx New Play Festival, Stages Repertory Theatre’s Sin Muros Latinx Theatre Festival, Ammunition Theatre Company, Antaeus Playwrights Lab, The Mid-America Theatre Conference, The Road Theatre Company, Kitchen Dog Theater, Prop Thtr, The Midwest Dramatists Conference, Imprint Theatreworks, and the One-Minute Play Festival. Franky holds a BA in Theatre from the University of North Texas, and his work has been featured throughout the Dallas Ft. Worth metroplex where he served proudly as the 2018 Dramatists Guild Regional Representative.

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Alexandra Espinoza is a theatre artist whose work aims to connect creative power to community voices. As a dramaturg, Alexandra practices dramaturgy as community engagement and served as the inaugural “communiturg” on Simpatico Theatre Project’s production of Red Bike. Additional dramaturgy and directing credits include work with Azuka Theatre, Inis Nua Theatre, the National Constitution Center, and PlayPenn. As a playwright, she is a first-year member of the Foundry at PlayPenn and her short play Delivery has been produced by Juniper Productions. She has a BA in History from Harvard and is a proud member of Villanova’s MA in Theatre Class of 2018.

: Acclaimed actor and playwright Mike Wiley has spent the last decade fulfilling his mission to bring educational theatre to young audiences and communities across the country. Through his performances, Wiley has introduced countless students and communities to the legacies of Emmett Till, Henry “Box” Brown and more. His recent works include a one-man play based on Tim Tyson’s memoir Blood Done Sign My Name and The Parchman Hour. Mike has a MFA from the UNC Chapel Hill and is the 2010 and 2014 Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and UNC. http://mikewileyproductions.com/

k. lyons is a Black queer playwright and memoirist from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Their work has been seen at The Tank as part of the Black Box Project NYC’s second cycle and at Washington University in St. Louis, as part of the Playground Experiment’s Faces of America Monologue Festival, and at Possibilities Theatre Company. She is a proud alum of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (Tennessee Williams Scholar) and of the HBMG Foundation’s National Winter Playwrights’ Retreat. They received their B.A. in Drama from Washington University in 2019.