Germaine Shames

(updated 5/24/2024) Germaine Shames, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Nat’l Fellow, Kilroys List playwright, and recipient of her state’s Literary Fellowship in Fiction, is author of the award-winning novels, Between Two Deserts and You, Fascinating You. Writing under the pen name Casper Silk (Hotel Noir, Echo Year), she has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and P.D. James “on steroids”. After covering world conflicts as a correspondent and witnessing firsthand the gamut of senseless tragedies behind the headlines, she realized that hard news could never convey an iota of the deeper story she was gleaning. She turned to fiction writing, learning that she can find light in the most horrific situations and leave readers (and now an audience) with hope. As a playwright, Shames has celebrated premieres across the U.S. as well as abroad and been recognized in a number of festivals, including Women’s Voices 2024, Fulton Theatre’s Stories of Diversity 2023, Pegasus Theatre’s Fresh Reads 2023 (First Place), Page to Stage 2023, ThinkTank TYA’s inaugural Playwrights Festival, Cimientos 2019, and Festival of New American Theatre 2018. As a librettist-lyricist, Shames collaborates with world-class composers in musical theatre, opera, choral and popular music. Her eco-opera The Bird Lady previewed in 2021 at the National Opera Center. Her immigration musical, Capri, won Skyline Theatre’s new musical search and was their singular offering at the 2022 NJ Theatre Alliance Festival. In 2019 and 2020 respectively, Theatre Elision produced her musicals If the Spirit Moves and The Manifesto. Later this year, she looks forward to the NYC concert premiere of her operatic Edith Wharton adaptation, In Venice. Shames holds a Master’s in Intercultural Studies. She writes from a global perspective with the conscious aim of fostering interethnic, intergenerational and cross-gender understanding. It’s all about love

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
https://germainewrites.wixsite.com/buzz
FB: @germaine.shames
TW: @GermaineWrites

MORE ABOUT ME
As a former novelist, story is at the core of all I create. I write listening for the still, small voice and trust it to deliver a message at once gut-honest and ennobling. I tell stories that open hearts and minds, make issues achingly and inescapably personal, and don’t let go. This has been true the whole of my writing career, whether reporting from a combat zone, crafting a song, or writing for the screen. Theatre has given me a creative home and caring community where I may realize my vision of a possible world. Nothing stirs me as deeply as the current of shared excitement that runs through a live audience when a play, musical or opera is working its magic.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
A play about three generations of women who stake their all on the fast-receding hope that the youngest among them, rendered paraplegic by a deadly explosion, might one day rise from her wheelchair and dance; a musical that explores anthropologist Margaret Mead's maiden voyage to Samoa though a post-Colonial lens; a Holocaust-themed opera celebrating the power of a remarkable interfaith friendship... I could go on. The well is deep.

KEYWORDS
social justice, environmental justice, musical, opera, site-specific, historical, adaptation, coming-of-age, coming-to-terms with age, gender parity, strong women's roles, over-40 roles, multicultural, family, political, female friendship, animal rights, women in science, life affirming