NEW YORK CITY: The Playwrights Realm, an Off-Broadway company dedicated to producing early career writers, has announced the four writers in its 2016-17 Writing Fellows program. The playwrights are Liza Birkenmeier, Clarence Coo, Donja Love, and Patricia Ione Lloyd.

Each year, four early career playwrights are selected to work on a new play over the course of nine months, transforming the work from a draft to a production-ready work. The plays will then be read at the INK’D Reading Festival in April 2017. Each playwright will receive a $3,000 stipend, an internal reading, and use of the Realm’s office space for printing, writing, and meetings.

Birkenmeier will work on radio island. She is also a member of the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater and is currently collaborating on a piece about water that will premiere with New Georges and 3LD in 2017.

Coo will work on The Birds of Empathy. He received the 2012 Yale Drama Series Prize for Beautiful Province (Belle Province).

Love will work on Sugar in Our Wounds. He’s also a 2016 Van Lier Playwriting Fellow at the Lark.

Lloyd will work on Eve’s Song. She is a writer on AMC television show “HAP and Leonard.” In 2016, she was a Sundance Resident Playwright for their theatre lab in Morocco, and a New York Theatre Workshop Fellow.

Since the program’s inception in 2009, 13 plays that have been developed through the Realm’s Writing Fellowship have gone on to full productions at either the Playwrights Realm or other professional theatres. Past fellows include Mia Chung (You For Me For You), Ethan Lipton (Red-Handed Otter), J.C. Lee (The Inexplicable Disappearance of Hector Villaraigosa), Amy Herzog (After the Revolution), Stephanie Zadravec (The Electric Baby), Sarah Gancher (The Place We Built), Elizabeth Irwin (My Mañana Comes), and Mfoniso Udofia, whose fellowship play Sojourners was produced by the Playwrights Realm in 2016, and will be produced in spring 2017 at New York Theater Workshop, in association with Playwrights Realm.