Playwright Aleshea Harris has won The Relentless Award, for her play “Is God Is,” The New York Times reports. The award includes prize money of $45,000 and opportunities for staged readings at regional theaters nationwide.
Harris, a playwright, poet, and performer, received a B.A. in General Theatre from the University of Southern Mississippi and is currently an MFA Writing for Performance candidate at California Institute of the Arts. She started Bag of Beans Productions and is a Co-Founding Artistic Director of Blue Scarf Collective.
The award, established by screenwriter David Bar Katz, was created last year in honor of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. About 2,000 unproduced plays were submitted for consideration. One of last year’s winners, Sarah “The Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves,” had a successful off-Broadway run.
Harris’ play “depicts a revenge story that draws from the ancient, the modern, the tragic, the spaghetti western, hip-hop and Afropunk,” the Times writes.
Harris started out her career as an actor herself, but, as she told The Huffington Post earlier this year, “I noted that people seemed to have a very narrow view of what kind of space my body could occupy on stage — and I found that really frustrating. I decided to write plays.”
The playwright cites Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, Augusto Boal, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Nina Simone as influences on her work.
