About Our Playwrights

The playwrights whose plays will be read on Sunday November 14, 2010 at the Bards Town, a restaurant and entertainment complex on Bardstown Road in Louisville, Kentucky are listed below. The second half of the list of playwrights will go up later in the week. Please come out and support these playwrights whose work the Kentucky Playwrights Workshop, Inc. would like to produce as part of the Kentucky Festival of New Plays in the spring of 2011, at the Bards Town.

Shan R. Ayers, author of the play Draped in Honor, holds an MFA and is a Professor of Theatre at Berea College. He teaches courses in design, script analysis, theatre history and playwriting. Twice he has taught playwriting for the Kentucky Institute for International Studies summer program in Japan and will be again in the 2011 summer program in Italy.

Trish Ayers, author of the 10-minute play Judging Quilts in this year's festival is co-artistic director and resident playwright of Mountain Spirit Puppets with her husband Shan Ayers. Her plays have toured the United States and Japan. She has been a guest artist at Iowa State and Western Illinois University and has won numerous playwriting awards from the Appalachian Writers Association. Ms. Ayers originated the Kentucky Women Playwrights’ Seminar, which has twice been funded by the Kentucky Foundation for Women (KFW). Currently she is editing the full-length play, “Taking Stock” with funding from the KFW Artist Enrichment Grant. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild.

James Hamblin, co author of Digging for Diamonds is an actor, writer and director from Georgetown, Kentucky. He has a BA in Communications from Georgetown College, and spent 2 years in the MFA Acting program at the University of Florida. James has performed off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, and throughout New England. He has worked in independent film and television, and works as a writer, director, actor and teacher all over the country; regionally, James has worked with Lexington Children’s Theatre.

Rose-Mary Harrington, author of There is No Dash, is from Ashland, Oregon. She holds a B.A. from New College of Speech and Drama, England and an M.A. from the University of Arizona in Theatre/Playwrighting. Ms. Harrington's efforts have been generously rewarded, they run the gamut from Pulse Ensemble in New York to the Kennedy Center and to being awarded honors by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. Rose-Mary was the 2009 recipient of the Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama. Rose-Mary is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America.