Playwright - 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. She received the Steinberg Award for both How the Light Gets In and 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, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for her epic Antarctic play Magellanica that was produced at Artists Repertory Theater in 2018 and released as a five-part audio podcast in 2020.
Other plays by Lewis include: Apple Season (which received a rolling world premiere from the National New Play Network in 2019), Infinite Black Suitcase, The Gun Show (which has had more than forty productions across the country, and went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland), Reading to Vegetables, True Story, Dorothy's Dictionary (winner of the Portland Civic Theater Guild New Play Award, upcoming at Theatre Lab in Florida), You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center), and How the Light Gets In (a semi-finalist for the O’Neill that premiered at Boston Court Pasadena, then went on to an acclaimed production at 1st Stage in Tysons, VA).
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, a new opera commissioned by American Lyric Theater that Lewis is working on with composer Evan Meier, had an orchestral workshop in New York City in February 2020. It received its academic premiere at Portland State University in Oregon in 20203, and its professional world premiere at Opera Modesto in California in 2024. Town Hall, her opera about health care in America, created with composer Theo Popov, was produced at University of Maryland and Willamette University. Lewis is a member of the Dramatist Guild's Opera Committee. She wrote her first musical, In the Deep, with composer Clarence Roscoe McDonald, and it premiered at Willamette University in 2023.
Lewis recently completed two new plays set in the Pacific Northwest -- Apple Hunters! and Strange Birds. She is currently working on a big, new political play called The Great Divide, originally commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as part of their American Revolutions program, and co-commissioned by Artists Repertory Theater, where she is Playwright in Residence through the Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency Program. She has another new play underway as well, called The Frankenstein Project.
Lewis is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights, Opera America, and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family’s farm in Oregon.
