MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY is the author of The Year of Yes: A Memoir (Hyperion, 2006), which has been translated into German, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and Chinese, and optioned for the screen by Paramount Pictures and the Jinks/Cohen Company. Her plays have been workshopped and produced at venues including The Sundance Playwrights Lab (Cowboy Movies), Esperance Theatre Company (How To Fit A Woman in a Bottle), Soho Rep (Tom Waits for Nobody), The WordBRIDGE Playwrights Lab, The Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices Lab (The Incredible Disappearing Lady, A Musical), Idaho Theatre for Youth (Tiny Fiend and the String Ball, A Musical), Brave New Works (Glorious Bummer), and Boise Contemporary Theater (Drive Me, Fakespeare, and Last of the Breed.) Her prose has been published or is forthcoming in a variety of magazines, newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies including The New York Times, Elle, The Washington Post, The Saint Ann’s Review, Best American Erotica, The Daily Telegraph, and Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex (Bloomsbury, 2008). She’s been seen on television programs including The Today Show, MSNBC’s Countdown, and more, and interviewed on radio stations from Seattle to South Africa, including NPR. Her plays Sugar and In the Bubblegum Forest were produced at NYU, during her time in the Tisch School Dramatic Writing Program. The latter won the Goldberg Playwriting Prize. She is currently working with director Mark Rucker on a contemporary adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. She's also at work on (possibly, anyway) turning a screenplay about dysfunctional love into a stage musical full of tortured, comic songs, and on a novel, based in part on her childhood in rural Idaho, living in an abandoned schoolhouse with 100 sled dogs. Headley is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a founding member of The Memoirists Collective, an organization that seeks to identify and support new talent in nonfiction, while also promoting member work. She lives in Seattle and New York, and is lucky as hell to be married to playwright and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan. Representation: Val Day, William Morris Agency.