News & Announcements

Acclaimed Playwright in Residence at Cornell

The Theatre Department is honored to welcome Naomi Wallace as a visiting professor in playwriting during the first block of the 2008-2009 academic year.  While in residence at Cornell, Wallace will teach an advanced playwriting course on campus, as well as weekend workshops to the graduate playwriting students at the University of Iowa. 

As part of her residency here, and in keeping with the emphasis placed by the Theatre Department on the development of new work, there will be a public reading of an early draft of her new play entitled Night, Welcome, a work commissioned by the British theatre company Clean Break.  The reading will be directed by Professor Mark Hunter and will be followed by a question and answer session with the playwright.  This project represents a reunion of sorts for Wallace and Hunter, who were once graduate students together at the University of Iowa. 

Naomi Wallace: A Brief Biography

Naomi Wallace was born in Kentucky, and presently lives in North Yorkshire, England.  Wallace's major plays include Things of Dry Hours, One Flea Spare, The Trestle of Pope Lick Creek, In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, The War Boys, The Inland Sea, Birdy (an adaptation for the stage of William Wharton's novel) and The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East.

Wallace's work has been produced internationally and has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, the Kesselring Prize, the Mobil Prize, an NEA grant, a Kentucky Arts Council Grant, a Kentucky Foundation for Women grant, and an Obie Award for best play.  Wallace is also a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the grant popularly known as the genius award.

Forthcoming productions include her new play, The Hard Weather Boating Party, at Actor's Theatre (Humana Festival) in 2009 and Things of Dry Hours at New York Theatre Workshop.