We love these folks and we bet you will too!
WRITERS
Bethany Dickens Assaf
Bethany Dickens Assaf is a freelance playwright, dramaturg, and theatre artist, the Literary Manager for MadLab Theatre in Columbus, and a co-founder of Whiskey Theatre Factory and the Fragmented Theatre Festival. As both a writer and producer, she is obsessed with plays that deconstruct and take unusual perspectives on gender and sexuality, challenging audiences and serving untapped artistic voices by creating meaningful roles for women.
Other favorite ideas/themes include female seperatism, evangelical Christianity, bisexuaity particularly in period settings, gender complementarianism, women in male-dominated spaces (gaming, cosplay), and the exploitation of women’s bodies for media such as reality television and true crime podcasts. Almost 100 of her plays have been performed or read across the country including her twisty sci-fi play, The Consciousness, which has been performed at over 10 fringe festivals across the country and won Best Play at the Tampa Bay Theatre Festival (director: Liz Colvert, stage manager: Meghan Pratt). She’s also had the amazing honor of working with organizations that are truly making an impact through storytelling such as Threshold Theatre, Theatre Works, FUSION Theatre, Road Theatre, EMBer Women’s Theatre, Central Florida Community Arts, Birdhouse Theatre, the Bechdel Group, and more.
Ned Eckhardt
Ned Eckhardt is a documentarian and writer based in northern Connecticut. He began his writing career as a playwright in New York City and created a successful career as a practitioner in the writing and visual arts. He is a writer across many genres. Currently, he has been focused on writing plays and opera librettos.
Featured Episodes
Clinton Festa
Clinton Festa began his career as a writer and cartoonist for his campus humor magazine. Since then he’s had short plays produced around the U.S. and Canada, comedy sketches that have placed in national competitions, and a novel recently published with CamCat Books.
During the pandemic, he wrote and directed a seven-episode action-comedy podcast called The Malone Family in the Enchanted Forest (produced by the Cary Playwrights’ Forum). Clinton runs an online book drive for inmates in prisons and juvenile detention centers called Sentences Book Donations. He lives in Greensboro, NC with his wife and children.
Order Clinton’s book, Ancient Canada: a Mythological Tale at CamCat
Featured Episodes
Max Langert
Max Langert is a playwright, producer and storyteller living in Austin. His plays have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas and elsewhere. He’s told stories for Listen to Your Mother, The Vancouver Story Slam, Testify and Austin Bat Cave, and is a regular performer at FronteraFest. He’s produced benefit shows for The Autism Society of Central Texas, The SAFE Alliance, and VELA Families. He’s excited to be working with the great team at Stories Found!
Featured Episodes
- Micro Monday: Living a Lie
- Episode 6: Personality Test
- Episode 2: The First Time I Got Naked in Front of a Bunch of People I Didn’t Know
Mark Harvey Levine
Mark Harvey Levine has had over 2000 productions of his short plays everywhere from Bangalore to Bucharest and from Lima to London. His plays have won over 45 awards and been produced in more than ten languages. His work has been published in over two dozen anthologies by Applause, Smith & Kraus, Routledge and Vintage. Full evenings of his ten-minute plays, such as “Cabfare For The Common Man”, “Didn’t See That Coming” and “A Very Special Holiday Special” have been shown around the world, including at the Edinburgh Fringe and in a multi-year tour of Brazil. A Spanish-language film of “The Kiss” (“El Beso”) premiered at Cannes and aired on HBO and DTV (Japan). Two of his plays were adapted for Brazilian television.
Featured Episodes
- Episode 5: The Interview
- Episode 12: A Very Special Hanukkah Special
- Micro: A Foggy Day in a Certain Part of Scotland – Mark Harvey Levine
Ladi Loera
Ladi Loera is an artist, animal lover and award winning storyteller.
He won the Moth with a story about sympathetic nausea and what it teaches us about love and connection.
He is a homebody, whose idea of traveling the globe is going to a different HEB. If you’re ever looking for him, he’s most likely at home.
Featured Episodes
Christian Missonak
Christian Missonak is a NYC-based playwright originally from Chicago, where he was a graduate of Columbia College and The Second City Conservatory.
Plays: Sheridan (Madlab Theatre), Save Ferris (Under the Gun Theatre), Cooperative (Metropolitan Playhouse). Audio: Banana Bread is a Myth (Earworm Audio Theatre podcast, Ep 9). Publication: Nowhere to Go Nights (The High Plains Register), Sheridan excerpt (The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2022 by Smith & Kraus Publishers).
Featured Episodes
Greg Romero
Greg Romero is originally from Louisiana, Cajun blood on both sides. His plays, site-specific projects, and sound-art collaborations have been presented in performance spaces, found spaces, and through the airwaves of the United States as well as Switzerland, Canada, The United Kingdom, and Jamaica. Romero was selected as the first-ever ArtsEdge Resident, was one of three playwrights to inaugurate the Philadelphia Dramatists Center/Plays & Players Playwriting Residency, and was a pilot member of Hyde Park Theatre’s Playwright’s Group. He may be the only playwright to have presented a play in the bathrooms of Actors Theatre of Louisville during the Humana Festival of New Plays.
He is an alum of the WordBRIDGE Playwrights Laboratory, The Last Frontier/Valdez Theater Conference, The William Inge Theater Festival, The Midwest Dramatists Conference, and his works are published by Heinemann Press, Next Stage Press, YouthPLAYS, and Playscripts. Romero received a BA in Liberal Arts from the Louisiana Scholars’ College and an MFA in Playwriting from The University of Texas at Austin where he held the James A. Michener Fellowship.
He is a member of ScriptWorks, The Dramatists Guild of America, and teaches at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where he visits the alligators. He loves being outside.
Featured Episodes
Brian Rust
Brian Rust (he/him) is a Boston-based actor and writer who makes chocolates and searches for cryptids in his spare time. High points of his career include being killed by a pillow during The Robin Hood Faire, appearing on stage with Le Tigre as a member of the Art School Cheerleaders, and using a plunger and ten pounds of jello to create an unforgettable foley effect for a live radio version of CHICKEN HEART. Most recently he wrote and directed ‘Plan 8 from the Outer Ether’ (a steampunk prequel to the infamous Ed Wood film), and directed and produced ‘Strange Tales of Davis Square’, an interactive audio tour that took participants on a hunt around a local neighborhood to discover mp3s of stories set in the exact spot they were standing.
Featured Episodes
Fred Tacon
Fred Tacon is a playwright, composer, director, and performer from Hebron, Kentucky (just over the river from Cincinnati, Ohio). He recently starred as Nick Bottom in a sold-out run of ‘Something Rotten!’ at The Footlighters Inc. in Newport, Kentucky. Fred’s writing usually focuses on theatre for young audiences, and his musical, ‘The Jester Prince’, and plays, ‘Clara and the Nutcracker’ and ‘Swan Pond’, have been enjoyed by audiences in Kentucky and Ohio. He has also written several short plays, musicals, and monologues that have been seen and streamed in a variety of ways and places. His 10-minute musical, ‘Puddle Jumpers’, will be a part of The Drama Workshop’s Homebrew Theatre, January 2023, in Cincinnati. Fred serves as Vice President of the Kentucky Playwrights Workshop, an organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging the development of new works for the stage by Kentucky playwright
Featured Episodes
Jason Rainey
Jason Rainey is a member of ScriptWorks in Austin. His work has been commissioned, presented, or produced by ScriptWorks, Last Frontier Theatre Conference (Valdez, AK), Penobscot Theatre (Bangor, ME), Daedalus Theatre (Columbus), Freshwater Theatre (Minneapolis), Mildred’s Umbrella (Houston), Sound Plays, Texas Dramatist Playwriting Series, and Punchkin Rep in Austin. He has directed several of his own short plays at Austin’s FronteraFest, receiving a Best of Fest citation in 2011.
Featured Episodes
Jonathan Wickremasinghe-Kuhn
Jonathan Wickremasinghe-Kuhn grew up in Selma, Alabama and attended the University of Southern California, where he received both his BFA in Writing for Screen and Television and his Master of Professional Writing degree.
He has performed story-telling multiple times at The Moth and for the Two Truths & A Lie podcast.
His plays have been produced by the A Light in Dark Places Festival, the Paragon Festival, Exposition Review, Stage Left Theater, Laughing Pig Theatre, Carrollwood Players Theatre, Magnetic Theatre, and Crafton Hills College.
Featured Episodes
ARTS ORGS
826 National
826 National helps foster a love of creative writing in children. Their mission is to help young people use writing as a tool to ignite and channel their creativity, explore identity, advocate for themselves and their community, and achieve academic and professional success.
You can help 826 advance this goal by volunteering at a local chapter, buying the children’s published works, or shopping at one of their stores which each have a different creative theme. New Orleans offers the The New Orleans Haunting Supply Company. Listeners in Los Angeles can visit The Time Travel Mart, while those in Boston can stop by the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute. There are currently 9 really cool stores like this in cities across the country.
Visit 826national.org to learn more about this amazing program and to see how you can help them continue to foster a love of creative writing in children.
Catskill Mountain Foundation
The Catskill Mountain Foundation believes that art can transform the lives of those touched by it and so they aim to combine high-quality performances, artist residencies, and arts education in a multi-faceted program.
Find out more about the Catskill Mountain Foundation, their programs, and how you can help further their vision at catskillmtn.org
Cinnamon Path Theatre
Cinnamon Path Theatre is a small collective of artists based in Austin, Texas. Scrappy and well-intentioned, they like site-specific work.
They’ve produced a number of new plays by emerging writers, as well as a handful of variety shows featuring a slew of local artists benefiting The Autism Society of Central Texas, Safe Place, Vela Families and more.
Kentucky Playwrights Workshop
The Kentucky Playwrights Workshop is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion, encouragement, and support of playwrights who live in the state of Kentucky.
Neo Ensemble Theatre
Based in Los Angeles, Neo Ensemble Theatre is a collaborative and diverse company of artists committed to educating and inspiring the community through the celebration of humor within the human condition.
The Post-Meridian Radio Players
The Post-Meridian Radio Players are a Boston-area group of creatives dedicated to exploring audio theater as a unique art form. They offer live performances and studio productions of both classic tales from the Golden Age of Radio and original works, with a special emphasis on science-fiction, fantasy, and horror.
ScriptWorks
ScriptWorks is a playwriting organization based in Austin, Texas, but it’s membership is open to playwrights across the country. Every year, ScriptWorks hosts the Weekend Fling. Writers have 48 hours to write a ten-minute play including three required ingredients. The event culminates with a cold reading Salon on Sunday and all scripts submitted are then reviewed by a selection committee for the Out of Ink Festival.
Ava’s a member of ScriptWorks and very literally owes her playwriting success to it. Join us!
Sentences Book Donations
Our featured organization this week is Sentences: Book Donations. Their goal is to network readers with prison librarians and juvenile detention centers to determine their needs and donate books for use in their facilities.
Southbank Theatre Company
Southbank Theatre Company in Indianapolis is a nonprofit theatre dedicated to enriching the Indianapolis community by producing shows by Indiana playwrights and are committed to new play development.
Testify
Testify is a live storytelling show in Austin, Texas.
All the stories told at Testify are true stories told by the people that lived them. Join them each month to hear folks share a part of their lives with you.
And, if you have a story to tell, they’d love to hear it. They take submissions all year long. They have themes suggested for each month, but they give wide room for interpretation of the themes.
Whiskey Theatre Factory
Whiskey Theatre Factory is a theatre collective based in Orlando, FL with the mission to produce meaningful theatrical productions that uplift, develop, and celebrate emerging and untapped voices. We challenge our community through provocative, authentic pieces, examining our culture and revealing the grace of humanity.
BUSINESSES
Alicia Verdier Photography
Alicia Verdier Photography – specializing in natural light photography. Contact Alicia to arrange a shoot for your family photos, portraits, weddings, births, engagements, senior photos, graduations and other special events. Outdoor or studio sessions available.
Team Jemini Designs
Team Jemini Designs is the place for bold, fun, pop culture themed items. T-shirts, gifts and more!
Magikjaz Creations
Magikjaz Creations is a woman, minority, and lgbtq+ owned business based in Austin, Texas. Jazmyn is a proud latinx artist who creates jewelry and wearable art and specializes in chainmail and wirework.