News
FERTILE GROUND an O’Neill Semifinalist
Jennifer’s full-length play Fertile Ground is a Semifinalist (top 15% of 1200+ submissions) for the 2022 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference. Jennifer’s award-winning play Charlotte’s Letters was a previous O’Neill Semifinalist.
“Chem Class” selected for Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival
Jennifer’s ten-minute play Chem Class has been selected (out of 800+ submissions) for the 2022 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival. A staged reading will be performed at Southeast Missouri State University June 12, 2022, and the play will be published in the anthology Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival 2022: The Short Plays.
“Sugar” selected by Lakeshore Players
Jennifer’s play Sugar has been selected by Lakeshore Players for its 18th Annual Ten-Minute Play Festival at Lakeshore Players Theatre in White Bear Lake, MN, June 2-12, 2022.
Jennifer O’Grady
Jennifer O’Grady is an award-winning American playwright and poet. Her plays are produced across the U.S. and internationally and have won the Rising Artist Award, Henley Rose Award, audience-choice awards and many other honors. Her work is published in multiple editions of The Best Ten-Minute Plays, Best New Ten-Minute Plays, Best Women’s Stage Monologues and other anthologies. She is also the author of two poetry books, White (Midlist First Series Award for Poetry) and Exclusions & Limitations (Plume Editions/MadHat Press). Her poems appear in Poetry, Harper’s, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, American Poetry: The Next Generation and numerous other places. Welcome to Jennifer’s website!
In twin chairs by the lakeside tonight
we’ve watched day’s last lightspread like a bright blush over treetops
past the point where cabins standabandoned, sealed against winter.
In the middle distance the island floats,fading. There alone the wild blueberries
hang like unmarked globes over waterseparating shore from shore.
Why they grow there but not herepuzzles, like love or the coming bereavements
of autumn, or rumors of empty, drifting skiffs.For now at least the island remains
part and not part of the unknowing nightas we are to each other
island and mainland, ship and shore,a familiar place; a mystery.
Educate girls and there will be no more guillotines. That is what my father told me.
My father knew nothing about girls.
(Excerpt from monologue forthcoming in The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2022)
She is making herself and not herself—
anguish dressed in baroque repose,a motionlessness that is never still,
arranged, betraying nothing—the restrained line of an eyebrow or lip,
the arc of a neck, the skillful reflectionof a sleeve of the moon-white gown
in the olive-green watergradually assembled, balanced there
in this unexpected moment,this small world holding its breath.
Okay. So sue me. Do you have any idea what it’s like being me?
(To an Audience member:)
Maybe you do, but the rest of you don’t. People always thinking you’re fucked up or off your meds, eve when you try to hide it. But we can’t hide anything from them. They know. Ever try to ignore someone who’s yakking at you ceaselessly? And believe me, the dead can talk. They don’t have anything else to do.
(Excerpt from monologue published in The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2017)