MINNEAPOLIS: Playwrights’ Center has announced the recipients of the 2018-19 McKnight National Residency and Commission, and the 2018-19 McKnight Fellowships in Playwriting.

“To have the longtime support of a visionary partner like the McKnight Foundation is both unique and extraordinary,” said Jeremy B. Cohen, producing artistic director at the Playwrights’ Center, in a statement. “To have it align with nurturing three such brilliant playwrights reinforces the great new vision of theatre in our country—a country that needs these voices now more than ever.”

Idris Goodwin has been selected for the 2018-19 McKnight National Residency and Commission. Goodwin will receive a $15,000 commission, $5,750 in workshop funds, plus travel and housing stipends to support the development of his play Scarfoot Lives, about an interconnected family of black creatives that spans 150 years. Idris was a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer from 2013-16. His play The Way the Mountain Moved, commissioned as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s American Revolutions Series, was co-developed through the Playwrights’ Center’s partnership program and will receive its world premiere in the summer of 2018.

The 2018-19 McKnight Fellows in Playwriting will be May Lee-Yang and Tori Sampson. The fellowship is awarded to Minnesota-based playwrights. Lee-Yang and Sampson will each receive a $25,000 stipend, $2,500 to support play development and other professional expenses, and $1,400 in travel funds.

“I am honored,” said Goodwin in a statement. “I am thrilled. And I am charged up! Ever since I first set foot into the Playwrights’ Center over 15 years ago, I knew it’s where I belonged. I leap at all opportunities to be within the walls of that building. This is the right play and the right time and now I have the right circumstances to spark its creation.”