Lauren Gunderson & Janet Bell

Lauren M. Gunderson is the most produced playwright in America of 2017, the winner of the Lanford Wilson Award, the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and the Otis Guernsey New Voices Award, she is also a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and John Gassner Award for Playwriting, and a recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s 3-Year Residency with Marin Theatre Company. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University, and Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School where she was a Reynolds Fellow in Social Entrepreneurship. Her work has been commissioned, produced and developed at companies across the US including South Cost Rep (Emilie, Silent Sky), The Kennedy Center (The Amazing Adventures of Dr. Wonderful And Her Dog!), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The O’Neill, The Denver Center, San Francisco Playhouse, Marin Theatre, Synchronicity, Berkeley Rep, Shotgun Players, TheatreWorks, Crowded Fire and more.  She co-authored Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley with Margot Melcon, which was one of the most produced plays in America in 2017. Her work is published at Playscripts (I and You, Exit Pursued By A Bear, The Taming, and Toil And Trouble), Dramatists (The Revolutionists, The Book of Will, Silent Sky, Bauer, Miss Bennet) and Samuel French (Emilie). Her picture book Dr Wonderful: Blast Off to the Moon was be released from Two Lions / Amazon in May 2017.

Janet Cheatham Bell has been engaged in research, teaching and writing to help correct distortions about Americans of African descent since 1968. In 1984 she left her position as a textbook editor to become a consultant to the book publishing industry and to publish her own books. The first two, Famous Black Quotations and some not so famous and Famous Black Quotations on Women, Love and other topics were self-published in 1986 and 1992. In 1994 she licensed the publishing rights to Warner Books, whose Famous Black Quotations was published in 1995. Within the next seven years Bell had nine books of quotations on the market. In 2013, she was cited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. on national television as “a pioneer in doing books of black quotations.” Bell has also written a collection of essays, Victory of the Spirit, published by Warner in 1996. In 2007, her coming-of-age story, The Time and Place That Gave Me Life, was published by Indiana University Press. Bell revived Sabayt Publications, her self-publishing imprint, in 2011 for a second essay collection, Not All Poor People Are Black. Mixed Marriage: A Memoir (Sabayt Publications, 2018) is her fourteenth book.