Keith Josef Adkins is a playwright and screenwriter, whose plays include Safe House, a commission from the Alliance Theater honoring August Wilson (Goodman Theater New Stages Series), Farewell Miss Cotton (Black Dahlia Theater, Los Angeles), The Patron Saint of Plants, a commission from the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Pitbulls, a commission from the Mark Taper Forum (Bay Area Playwrights Festival – Honorable Mention, Mark Taper Forum New Plays Festival), Salt on Sugar Hill (Mark Taper Forum New Plays Festival), Hollis Mugley’s Only Wish (Hip Hop Theater Festival, Intersection of the Arts, Here NYC), On the Hills of Black America (Cleveland Public Theater, Intersection of the Arts, Stanford University, Here NYC), Wilberforce (Cleveland State University, National Black Theater Festival, Cleveland Public Theater), The Global Warming Plays (Producer’s Club NYC), Play (Partial Comfort Productions NYC), Cobra Neck (Humana Festival) and Sweet Home (Bay Area Playwrights Festival). Keith’s latest play, The Dangerous, is a commission from The Joseph Papp Public Theater and New York State Council on the Arts.

Awards include a 2008 Kesselring Prize nomination, Richard Sherwood Distinguished Emerging Theater Artist Award, Robert S. Duncanson Artist Fellowship and Residency, two Cleveland Public Theater Best Play of the Festival Awards, a Van Lier Fellowship, and an Ensemble Studio Theater/Sloan Science Foundation Playwriting Grant. Keith has been published in Humana Festival 2003 – The Complete Plays, The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2005, and Playscripts.

In TV and film, Keith worked three seasons as a writer on the CW hit comedy Girlfriends. His episode “X Does Not Mark the Spot,” a story that examined the drug Ecstasy, garnered a Prism Award nomination. His short films Invisible Screams and Love Aquarium (a script he co-authored), have appeared on BET-J. Keith’s screenplay The Disappearing, commissioned by Starburst Films, is scheduled for production in Fall 2009.Keith also blogs regularly on culture and the arts for TheRoot.com (an online magazine supported by the Washington Post and Newsweek Interactive).

Janine Nabers hails from Houston, Texas. She holds an MFA in playwriting from the New School for Drama, and is an alumna of the National Theater Institute. Janine's plays have been finalists for: the Princess Grace Award, the Victory Garden's IGNITION playwriting award, The Theodore Ward Playwriting prize, the POPS TNT playwriting prize, and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. In 2008, her play Juniper; Jubilee was the winner of the Samuel French One-Act Play Festival. A resident playwright of Odyssey Productions and a member of the play group at Ars Nova, Janine is also a proud member of the Harlem Arts Alliance and the Dramatists Guild. She is published by Samuel French.

THE 2009 WORKS:

Keith Josef Adkins —

Safe House synopsis:
The place is Kentucky. The time is 1843. The state has just passed a law prohibiting free blacks from learning to read, and the Fugitive Slave Act is only a few years away. At the center of this world is Addison, a proud and stern “free man of color.” Addison works as a shoemaker while protecting his family from racist whites and embittered slaves. Addison and his family also have a secret—they’ve been helping fugitives flee and set sail for Liberia. Caught once, they lost their rights, friends and mobility. If they ever help fugitives again, they’ll forfeit every legal privilege granted to them and be sold into bondage. So when a young fugitive knocks on their back door seeking refuge, all they hold dear—freedom, racial loyalty and their future—is tested.

Janine Nabers —

West of the Willow Tree synopsis:
A motherless black boy living in Louisiana during the Great Depression is spooked by the ghost of a lynched man. Unable to communicate with his estranged father or cope with the harsh realities around him, Junior’s imagination takes him on a fantastical journey through time where the land of the living and the land of the dead intertwine. It is only when Junior’s two worlds collide that he is forced to unearth the secrets of the land he stands on ... and finally confront his father.