Meet the winner of
THE
PLAYWRIGHTS
FESTIVAL 2018
BRIE KNIGHT
Playwright of Pancake Queen
The Lorraine Hansberry staged reading festival was the culmination of our theatre's Playwrights Competition, to discover new comedies that would ensure prominent roles for people of color.
Pancake Queen is a fantastical, witty, and harrowing historical imagining of a time in 1893 when Pancake Queenformer slave, Nancy Green, was hired by a Missouri miller, Randolph T. Davis, to portray the first iteration of the marketing icon, "Aunt Jemima."
Brie received her M.A. in Theatre from Villanova University and is an alum of the Philadelphia Playwrights' Lab, The Foundry.
Our 2018 WINNER
Thank you to our other finalists!
MISS LAURA MAYE OF HARLEM by Jamal Williams
Miss Laura Maye of Harlem is a historically accurate themed play that examines important points in the life of a 104-year-old black woman who has lived her life entirely in Harlem.
Jamal is an award-winning playwright, has a Master of Creative Writing degree from San Francisco State University and was a Playwright-in-Residence of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in 1989-1992.
FLOW by Cleavon Smith
In Flow, a 40-year-old stuntwoman, tired of almost dying for a living, decides she wants to have a baby. Ticking louder than her biological clock is the one that counts down the days of her boyfriend's final week in town before he moves acrosscountry to start his new job.
Cleavon teaches English at Berkeley City College and is in his third year as the playwriting mentor for the Berkeley Rep's Young Writers of Color Collective.