Playwright - opera librettist - teacher.
E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. Lewis received the Steinberg Award for Song of Extinction and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, and the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama. Now Comes the Night was part of the Women's Voices Theater Festival in Washington DC, and was published in the anthology Best Plays from Theater Festivals 2016. Talking to Westfield was commissioned by Premiere Stages for their Liberty Live initiative. The Gun Show premiered in Chicago in 2014, and has since been produced in more than thirty theaters across the country and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland; it was published in The Best American Short Plays 2015-2016. Magellanica -- Lewis' epic Antarctic adventure story -- had its world premiere at Artists Repertory Theater earlier this year, and received an Edgerton Award from the Theater Communications Group. Other plays by Lewis include: Apple Season (premiering at NJ Rep in January 2019), How the Light Gets In (premiering at Boston Court Pasadena in September 2019), Infinite Black Suitcase, Reading to Vegetables, True Story, and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center). Lewis is currently working on two operas, a big new political play called The Great Divide, and an intimate play about an unlikely friendship called Dorothy's Dictionary. Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights, Opera America, and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.
