Photo by Deborah Lowery
Jennifer O’Grady is an award-winning American playwright and poet.
Her plays have been staged throughout the United States and in Europe, Australia, Asia, Canada and Mexico. Selected plays include Charlotte’s Letters (Henley Rose Award; Rising Artists Award; O’Neill NPC Semifinalist and other honors); Fertile Ground (Semifinalist for the O’Neill NPC, Prince Grace Award/New Dramatists Fellowship and Panndora’s Box); Paranormal Love (MTWorks Newborn Award; NEWvember Finalist; Panndora’s Box Honorable Mention); Ellery (Bechdel Group Selection; Waterworks Finalist); still small voice (Moxie Incubator Finalist); and Sugar (Authenticity Theatre Audience-Choice Award and Finalist for the Gary Garrison Playwriting Award and City Theatre’s Susan J Westfall National Playwriting Award). Her plays are published in multiple editions of the annual Best Ten-Minute Plays, Best Women’s Stage Monologues, Best New Ten-Minute Plays and Stage It!, among other anthologies, and have been presented by The Irish Rep, The Stella Adler Center for the Arts, 13th Street Theatre, City Theatre Miami, The Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival, Short+Sweet, Little Fish Theatre, 6th Street Playhouse, Heartland Theatre Company, Round the Bend Theatre, Gi60 and many others including colleges and schools across the U.S. and beyond.
She is also the author of the poetry collections White, Wnner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry and a Greenwall Award from The Academy of American Poets and cited by Foreword for its “glittering intelligence,” and most recently Exclusions & Limitations (Plume Editions/MadHat Press), called “compassionate, elegant, edgy, and intelligent” by Rain Taxi . Her individual poems are published, reprinted, broadcast and taught in numerous places, among them Poetry, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Writer’s Almanac, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Yale Review, Plume, Poetry Daily, BBC Radio 4 and American Poetry: The Next Generation (to name just a few), and have garnered awards and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poem “Moths” (included in White) is especially widely shared and reprinted and has also been set to music and recorded by American Modern Ensemble.
Jennifer grew up in New York City and holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and a BA from Vassar, where she won awards for her writing. She lives with her family in New York City.