Writing Fellowship
The Playwrights Realm Writing Fellowship Program awards four early-career playwrights with nine months of resources, workshops and feedback designed to help them reach their professional and artistic goals.
Applications for our 2024-25 Writing Fellowship are now closed. Sign up for our mailing list at the bottom to get notified when they open again!
Banner Photo: 2018/19 Writing Fellows Bleu Beckford-Burrell, Else C. Went, Sarah Einspanier, and Keelay Gipson (Photo credit: Daniel J. Vasquez Productions).
Reading of Celine Song’s Endlings at the 2018 INK’D Festival of New Plays (Photo Credit: Daniel J. Vasquez Productions)
Program Details
- $5,000 Award
- Fellows develop a single, new play.
- Monthly group meetings provide a collaborative space for writers to share and refine their work.
- One-on-one meetings with Realm artistic staff support each writer's process.
- Fellows collaborate with a director, design consultants, and actors for two readings.
- Personalized professional development resources are tailored to the group - mentor opportunities, meet-and-greets, and professional seminars are designed to shed light on the business of theatre, and empower the Fellows to be active, informed participants in their own careers.
- The culminating event of the program is the INK'D Festival, featuring a public presentation for each Fellow.
Who We're Looking For
We look for dedicated early-career writers who crave a long-term, rigorous development process. We value intellectual curiosity, imagination and bravery. We love plays with evocative language, plays that contemplate big, unanswerable questions, that embrace the complexity of life, and demonstrate an understanding of the possibilities of dramatic storytelling. And of course, plays that are inherently theatrical—that could never be anything other than a play!
As a playwright-centric company hoping to help create the next generation of successful playwrights, we believe it is our responsibility to ensure that the playwrights and the stories we support fully reflect the diversity of the society we live in. As such, we encourage writers and stories with unique cultural perspectives, experiences and backgrounds.
"I hoped to find the draft that was stuck in my mind for so many years that really held space for multiple genres and was comedic and truthful and dark simultaneously. I wanted to have space to work with actors and directors while still having a separate space to work with writers and theatre professionals who were not direct collaborators and I wanted to do this over time so that I could really give the play the depth and research that it deserved. I DID GET THAT, thank you!"
MAYA MACDONALD
19/20 Writing Fellow
Sample Program Timeline
September: Individual meetings to set goals for the year
October: Writers Group meetings and conversations with designers to think about the physical elements of the script
November: Internal script readings
December – January: internal readings feedback
February: Writers Group meetings
March: writer's retreat and conversations with designers to think about the look and feel of the presentations (optional)
April: rehearsals and INK'D Festival of New Plays presentations
May: Post-INK'D check-ins and learnings
June: Final celebration!
We seek people who dare to ask the big questions, even if they don't know the answer.
Are you our next playwright?
