Jennifer O'Grady

Jennifer O'Grady is a New York-based playwright and poet who began writing plays in her mid-forties while raising her two children. Her plays have been produced and developed nationally and internationally and include CHARLOTTE'S LETTERS (2020 Rising Artists Award; 1st Place Henley Rose Award; NEWvember Festival Dublin; O'Neill Semifinalist and other honors); JUGGLING WITH MR. FIELDS (2020 Southwest Theatre Productions Finalist); PARANORMAL LOVE (MTWorks Newborn Festival; NEWvember Finalist; 2019 Pandora's Box Honorable Mention; 2020 Southwest Theatre Productions Semifinalist); ELLERY (selected for The Best Women's Stage Monologue and a 2019 Bechdel Group selection); and “Persephone” (published in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2019). Her short plays have won ten-minute play contests and audience-choice awards and are also published in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2017 and 2016 and The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2021. Her work is also included in Best Contemporary Monologues for Women 18-35, Stage It 3: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, The PlayGround Experiment's Faces of America Anthology, Breath of Fire Latina Theater Ensemble’s Covid Monologues and other publications. Jennifer is also the author of two books of two books of poetry, WHITE (Mid-List First Series Award for Poetry) and EXCLUSIONS & LIMITATIONS (Plume Editions/MadHat Press). Her poems are taught, anthologized, set to music and featured in numerous places including Harper’s, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Writer's Almanac, BBC Radio 4, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and American Poetry: The Next Generation (to name a few). Born and raised in New York City, Jennifer earned a BA from Vassar, where she won awards for her writing, and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She lives just outside New York City with her husband, son and daughter, two dogs, two cats and a rabbit.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA
https://www.jenniferogrady.net
FB: https://www.facebook.com/jenniferogradypoet/
TW: @OGradyJennifer
IG: @jogrady.writes

MORE ABOUT ME
When not writing or seeing plays I love hanging out with my family, walking my dogs, watching old movies, reading mystery novels and (in better times) traveling and exploring my beloved New York City, where I grew up and spent the majority of my adult years.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON
I'm usually juggling multiple projects, which currently include a full length about incarceration and a short play about the women of the 9th Street Show.

KEYWORDS
mystery, animals, biography, historical, holiday, comedy, drama, monologues, political, women