January 30, 2008
Playwright Rebecca Gilman named 2008 Harper Lee Award recipient

Rebecca Gilman rehearses a scene from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Photo by Joan Marcus

MONTGOMERY, Ala.— Playwright and Trussville, Ala., native Rebecca Gilman is the 2008 recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year. The honor is presented annually by Alabama Southern Community College at the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville. It is made possible through a generous grant from George F. Landegger of Alabama River Pulp Company, Inc. “I'm thrilled and deeply honored,” said Gilman about her most recent literary honor. “Harper Lee is a hero of mine and To Kill a Mockingbird inspired me to become a writer, so I'd have to say it doesn't get any better than this!” Gilman’s plays include Dollhouse, Spinning Into Butter, Boy Gets Girl, Blue Surge and The Glory of Living. Her plays have been produced at the Goodman Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre, Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club and Manhattan Class Company.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prince Prize for Commissioning New Work, the Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays, the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright and the George Devine Award. Gilman was named a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Glory of Living. Her play The Crowd You’re In With was chosen for the 2007 Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference and premiered at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in November 2007. She is currently writing the book for the musical The Boys are Coming Home with music and lyrics by Leslie Arden. The play will premiere at the Goodman Theatre in 2008.
Gilman teaches playwriting in the Master of Fine Arts program for Writing for the Screen and Stage at Northwestern University. She is a proud member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild.
George Culver, who nominated Gilman for the award and directs the Historic Talladega Ritz Theater, said, “We at the Historic Talladega Ritz Theater have a great affinity for Rebecca Gilman, rooted in our experience in presenting her exquisite adaptation of Carson McCuller’s 1940 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in our spring 2005 season. Heart was directed by Tony Award winning director Doug Hughes (Doubt), and was commissioned and performed by the Tony Award winning The Acting Company. “What a great sense of pride it should be for all Alabamians that one of the most prolific and important young playwrights in American theater today is a native of our great state,” Culver added.
The Alabama Writers’ Forum, a statewide literary arts organization and partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, coordinates the process to select the Harper Lee Award recipient annually from nominations from the field. The Harper Lee Award for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer of the Year carries with it a cash prize and a bronze sculpture by Frank Fleming of the Monroe County Courthouse clock tower. The courthouse is a setting for Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Previous winners since 1997 include Albert Murray, Sena Jeter Naslund, Wayne Greenhaw and William Cobb. The 2008 award will be given during the Alabama Writers Symposium, May 1-3.

For more information, contact the Alabama Writers’ Forum at 334-265-7728 or toll free at 866-901-1117.

E-mail writersforum@bellsouth.net.
On the Web: www.writersforum.org