Monica Raymond is a prize-winning poet and playwright. She was a Jerome Fellow for 2008-09 at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and a 2013 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Playwriting. Raymond's most recent production was Paper or Plastic, a short eco-opera for which she wrote the libretto, at the American Repertory Theater's Outside the Box Festival (Summer 2013). A to Z (Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award 2011 for plays about race/ethnicity) follows the relationship of two women, Annie and Zafiya, through 40 years of U.S. history (1968-2008) and all of the letters of the alphabet. The Owl Girl, about two families in the Middle East who both have keys to the same house, won the Clauder Gold Prize (Portland Stage Company), the Peace Writing Award and the Castillo Theatre Award in political playwriting. Other plays include Martina's Story (The Internationalists, Long Distance Affair), Safe House (Panelists Choice Award, Last Frontier Theatre Conference; O'Neill Finalist), Creche (Dramatic Publishing, 35 in 10), Lindsay (Subversive Theater Collective, 2005 Montreal and New York City Infringement Festivals), Novices (Best Short Plays of 2009) and many others. Her short play Hijab has been performed widely, including at the Boston Theater Marathon, by the Vital Theatre Company (New York City), the Samuel French Festival, and as part of "Occupied Territories: Palestinian- and Jewish-American Plays about the Middle East" at Boston Playwrights Theatre. Raymond hosted the panel "Making Theatre about Palestine/Israel" at the conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and toured as a performer in An Olive on the Seder Plate, a play by and for American Jews about human rights in Israel/Palestine. She has performed her own monologues and performance scores at Mobius, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and as part of Joe Chaikin's Disability Project at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, a fellow at BIARI (Brown International Advanced Research Institutes) and has received grants from the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Cambridge Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Raymond holds degrees from the University of Chicago (bachelor's in humanities), Columbia University (master's in English) and Smith College (master's in theatre/playwriting) and has taught writing and literature at Harvard, CUNY and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
