Maureen Brady Johnson has been writing, teaching and directing for over thirty years. Her ten minute play, "Rock, Paper, Scissors" was a finalist for the National Ten Minute Play contest for Actor's Theatre Louisville. “Harvesting the Marigold Seeds” won second place in the Little Theatre of Alexandria (Virginia) one act play contest. “The Nameless Princess” is published by Brooklyn Publishers. “Limbo”, a one act play, was a Finalist in the 2007 Eileen Heckart Senior Drama competition.

Maureen is the author of three books; Shoes on the Highway: Using Visual and Audio Cues to Inspire Student Playwrights, Middle Mania One and Two. She has written for The Loop, Gary Garrison’s (NYU) newsletter for playwrights, and has a guest column called “Along the Way” for the Oberlin News Tribune, her hometown newspaper. She is married to Mark, an artist specializing in silver jewelry, and they live in Oberlin, Ohio. They have four grown children. Maureen’s Dad grows garlic for the whole family and was the inspiration for this play when he told her one day that he had to “plant the music.”

Planting the Music
After the death of her father, a woman struggles to find a relevant way to honor his life.

P. Paullette MacDougal is Artistic Director and co-founder of Paradox Players in Austin, Texas. Her plays have been staged widely in the U.S.A. and throughout the English-speaking world. An award-winning playwright, author and filmmaker, Paullette holds an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University and has taught cinema studies at Drew University, Madison, NJ, and voice at Metropolitan College, Minneapolis. She has performed in opera and musical comedy. Paullette and her husband divide their time between Austin, TX and Edwards, Colorado.

Bloomingdale’s Elephants
Hilarious mayhem ensues in the Gift Wrap department when a young man insists on buying a particularly “potent” ream of wrapping paper.

Tencha Avila has loved the theatre since the age of four, when her farm worker father carried her across a makeshift stage in their home in a colonia near Las Animas, Colorado. She has been a teacher, U.S. cultural diplomat and U.S. Civil Rights Commission staff member. Since receiving an MFA from Ohio University in 1995, she has produced and directed plays by Edward Albee, Marsha Norman, Eve Ensler and others in the U.S. and Mexico and written, produced, directed and acted in her own plays, including “Maria y su sidekick” and “The London Impromptu.” Ms. Avila won the 2007 MetLife Nuestras Voces National Playwriting Competition. She is a member of the Dramatists Guild. She lives in Denver with her husband Walter Friedenberg and is the mother of three children and grandmother of three granddaughters.

Did It
High style meets 50’s morals with richly comic results.

Barbara Lindsay’s first full length play, FREE, won the NY Drama League's 1989 Playwrighting Competition and was given its premiere production in London in 1991. Since then there have been more than 100 national and international productions of her plays and monologues. Barbara has taught writing in California, West Virginia, and Washington. Her latest full length play, I-2195, won the Women's Playwrighting Award at the UM St. Louis and was produced there in Nov. 2005. She is a fifth generation Californian living in Seattle, WA, newly married, and ridiculously happy.

Canyon's Edge
Ghosts of a marriage converge on a lonely park bench.

Molly Rhodes is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area theatre company PlayGround, where she first developed her play Mrs, McKenzie Makes Herself Known. Last spring she was awarded the PlayGround Fellowship for a full length play, The Singularity of We, to be part of PlayGround’s 2008 Best of Festival. She has had her plays developed and performed at Magic Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and American Conservatory Theatre, among others. This spring, Molly will mentor a budding young female playwright as part of the 2008 San Francisco Young Playwrights Festival. She is also an artistic associate at Magic Theatre, where she coordinates the literary committee and oversees the development and creation of dramaturgy for Magic’s productions and workshops. When Molly is not working on plays or in the theatre, she raises money for At The Crossroads, a nonprofit that does counseling-based street outreach to homeless youth in San Francisco. She is also a freelance theatre critic for the San Francisco Weekly.

Mrs. McKenzie Makes Herself Known
Eleanor Rigby discovers a long hidden love.

Mary Casey was a 2007 finalist for the Heideman Award in the National 10-Minute Play Contest at Actors Theatre of Louisville. Her full-length play, "Women and Horses and a Shot Straight From the Bottle," had its world premiere at Echo Theatre in Dallas in 2006 and was nominated for Best New Play by the Dallas Theatre League. Mary lives in Southern California.

Hound Dog
The circle of life is brought into focus through Elvis’s hit song.