NEW YORK CITY: Vineyard Theatre has announced that John J. Caswell Jr. will receive the 2020-21 Paula Vogel Playwriting Award. Caswell, the 13th recipient of the prize named in honor of the Pulitzer-winning playwright and teacher, will be presented with the award via Zoom at the Vineyard’s Emerging Artists Virtual Salon on Oct. 21. The residency-based award includes a cash prize and artistic development support.
Caswell is a queer Mexican American playwright from Phoenix who is currently a fellow in Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. He is also the winner of the 2020 Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award, a 2019 Relentless Award Finalist, a 2018 MacDowell Fellow, a 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm Creative Resident, a current member of Play Group at Ars Nova, and the 2017 Page 73 Playwriting Fellow. Included as a demonstration of auto-ethnographic theatre, his play SHOTS: A Love Story was published as part of Johnny Saldaña’s book Ethnotheatre: Research From Page to Stage published by Left Coast Press. He earned his MFA from Hunter College.
Previous recipients of the award include Charly Evon Simpson, Jeremy O. Harris, Antoinette Nwandu, Kate Tarker, Boo Killebrew, Clare Barron, Christopher Chen, Erika Sheffer, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Kara Lee Corthron, Rajiv Joseph, and Tarell Alvin McCraney. Simpson, 2019’s recipient, will sit down with Caswell for a virtual Q&A during the salon.
