The journey of a creative
a story of resilience
From a young age I thought I wanted to be a news broadcaster (Peter Jennings specifically), and to that end, I entered a local talent competition with my own comedic newscast, which went over very well, i.e.: I got laughs, and from that experience, I started thinking about acting. What I hadn’t thought about at the time, was that I had written my entire act myself.
Aside from being invited to a young writers conference in 5th grade, most of my creative time involved acting and the pursuit of getting better at it. I got involved in high school speech and debate, and indeed, I am New Mexico State Champion in Prose and Poetry Interpretation from some long-ago date.
I received a full scholarship to The University of New Mexico in Acting and a partial scholarship in speech, but a decision had to be made, and so I never made it to the news. After receiving my B.F.A. in theatre with a minor in English, I went on to receive an M.F.A. in acting from Yale School of Drama.
In my second year at Yale, we were broken into groups to do three or four-person verse projects. My group was assigned Romeo and Juliet. I told my group I would do the cut of the entire play for us, and I did, I gave them their scripts and we did it. I remember it feeling very satisfying to work on the script that I had cut myself.
Coming out of Yale was tough, and I didn’t get my first job acting for nine months, but my agent was patient and I proceeded to work on and off for years, supporting myself with restaurant jobs in the lean times, and eventually I booked several acting jobs in a great year, and my focus went to those.
In 2016 I was diagnosed with that cancer that was promised me.
In 2017 I started and stopped three different chemotherapy cocktails until one worked well enough for me to have a stem cell transplant. On September 11, 2017 I checked into Mt. Sinai and was put in a Hepa-filtered room and given Melphalan, an extremely toxic high dose chemotherapy. The next day my own previously harvested stem cells were put back into me, and I spent two weeks trying to make my own white blood cells. After months at home with no immune system, I had a reading of a play of mine in December of 2017 at The 53rd Street NYPL, which I also rehearsed, directed, and attended with my new chic bald look. Needless to say, but hard to express, after spending so much time in my apartment, it was quite an evening to see my work being read by professional actors in public again. I was back.
In 2012, I was told I had about 5 years until I would develop a full-blown cancer which would require a long haul of chemotherapy. I started to think of what I would do once this cancer came. I did several years of a clinical trial, but continued to act, and kept my cancer to myself. In 2013 I was doing a play at Yale Rep, and I started to think about writing. I had a small part and a lot of time. I checked out every play by contemporary playwrights written in the last ten years, largely from lists that I got from students at the school at the time.
In 2014 I started taking the first of many classes in playwriting at ESPA. First with Brooke Berman, then Tessa LaNeve, Kia Corthron, and Michael Walkup twice. I basically put myself through my own graduate school.
The first writing group I got into was Exquisite Corpse and moved from their writing group to Writer in Residence and co-wrote their immersive piece A Ribbon About a Bomb 2017, and then went on to write my play The Chechens in their Writers in Residence group. The Chechens was my first production, and I will always be grateful to Exquisite Corpse. Spending two years in their writing group provided me with a second graduate school of a kind, one highly based on collaboration, seeing as devised pieces are part of their mission.
The Chechens went on to become the runner-up for the Inaugural Risk Modern Tragedy Writing Competition, and the winner of Alliance for the Arts Theatre Conspiracy Award and has since been produced by Theatre Conspiracy, Bennington College, and Pace University.
During the last few years, I have been a repeat visitor to Forge Retreat in Danbury Connecticut, colonized land of The Pahquioque, and have been mentored by Greg Taubman and Chie Morita.
I have been a Lambda Literary fellow under the guidance of Mfoniso Udofia, a National Winter Playwrights Conference fellow, A Playwrights Realm Fellow, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee studying with Nathan Alan Davis and Lilliana Padilla—and then staff 2023 and 2024, A a Quicksilver Theatre Company Writer in Residence for their Playwrights of Color Summit, and had my short play Mount Sinai produced by The Fire This Time Festival.
In 2023 I was admitted to New Dramatists, class of 2030 and graduated from Hunter College’s MFA program in playwriting. I’ve been teaching acting 3 (realism) and 6 (verse and heightened language) at Pace University as well as playwriting 1 and 2 at Hunter college. Beyond sharpening my skills, teaching has brought me a joy that I wasn’t expecting. I was once that student who needed mentorship, and in many ways I will always be that student, and those teachers made all the difference. Teaching is my opportunity to give back and have a positive effect on someone who may need a word of encouragement as much as I needed one.
My plays tend to overwhelmingly deal with the Black and Queer experience in America and the world. I’m concerned and obsessed with social justice.
For now, I’m on a low dosage of chemotherapy that does not inhibit my quality of life in any way, in fact, I feel much better than I did before starting treatment because I’m no longer anemic from a lack of hemoglobin. I hope to be finished with this cancer and chemotherapy for good soon, and just write, and live, and write.
