Introducing Our 2021 Playwrights
The 2021 Rocket City Playwrights’ Series is just around the corner, and we and our friends at Evil Cheez Productions are excited to tell you more about this year’s playwrights.
The Rocket City Playwrights’ Series is a a program to support the creation of new works by local writers. We believe that locally written and created productions can be a unique cultural opportunity, providing a direct lens into the identity of our local community and the surrounding communities of North Alabama. TH & ECP are committed to investing in and supporting our local storytellers and theatre artists who are interested in the creation of new live works.
This year on September 25th at 7 pm, the following five playwrights’ work will be presented to the public. The audience will vote on their top three, which will be awarded cash prizes. Tickets are $10 and are available at THtix.com.
Joe Conway was born and raised in Delaware County, PA, but has made Huntsville his home for the last 10 years. He is a professor of American Literature at the University of Alabama in Huntsville where several times a week he can be seen performing for crowds of English students to generally mixed reviews. He writes things about money, pop culture, and long dead writers. He loves his wife Kat and together they live on a very big hill with one cat who is crazy and another who is lazy.
Mercedes George lives in Madison, Alabama, and has a BA in Technical & Scripted Writing along with a BS in Materials Science & Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her short play “Storms Ahead” was featured in UAB’s 2019 Festival of Ten Minute Plays. She currently works as a System Engineer in Huntsville's Research Park and is in graduate school at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).
Pamela Manasco is a writer and English instructor living in Madison, Alabama. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and a BA in English from the University of Alabama. Her nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, American Literary Review, Descant, and others.
By her own account, Sarah Sizemore spends way too much time in fictional worlds. She studied English literature in college, which means she not only read hundreds and hundreds of stories, but also tried her hand at writing them. She currently teaches high school English, but also used to be in charge of the theatre program. She has enjoyed writing in her free time, so when looking for ways to save money for the theatre program, she tried her hand at writing plays and found she really enjoyed it. She loves seeing stories brought to life by the power of the performed word, and hopes playwrighting continues to be one of her ways to escape into the possible and the hopeful.
Joy Whitt is a writer, actress, and barbecue cook. She won 3rd Place in the 2019 Rocket City Playwright Series and 1st place in the 2021 Rocket City Short Screenwriters Competition. She has appeared in numerous plays with the Bank Street players in Decatur, has teamed up with Theatre Huntsville folks on several projects over the years, and has just joined the Evil Cheez gang, which she is especially excited about! Currently she's writing and filming a comedy series of shorts with BrownWood Production Company called "Leggtown."