The Kennedy Center Honors Local New Jersey Student Playwrights

The Kennedy Center has just announced the winners in its annual VSA Playwright Discovery Competition and four of the twelve winners are students involved in Writers Theatre's New Jersey Writers Project programs! Alessandra Sommers and Colin McKenna, the winners of the Junior Division (grades 8-9), are students at the Union Academy for Performing Arts in Elizabeth and The Craig School in Mountain Lakes, respectively. Elijah Gaines and Jaleel Lindsay, winners in the Senior Division (grades 10-12), were students at the Green Residential Community Home in Ringwood. McKenna, Gaines, and Lindsay were all mentored by Writers Theatre teaching artist, Dominique Cieri, while Sommers was mentored by another Writers Theatre teaching artist, Carolyn Hunt. Carolyn's work at Union Academy for the Performing Arts is part of a long-time collaboration between WTNJ and the school, providing a playwriting class to ninth-graders taught by a professional playwright.

Students from all over the country submitted plays to the Kennedy Center's annual competition, which boasts among its prizes the performance of the Senior Division winners' plays at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and a gift of $500 to the students' schools, to be put towards arts programming. Elijah and Jaleel traveled with a small group of their peers to The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. to see workshops of their play presented by professional actors. "We are very impressed with the work of these four young writers. All of their plays are moving portrayals of the experiences of living with disabilities," said John Pietrowski, Writers Theatre's Artistic Director. "Elijah and Jaleel's work is particularly potent, taking all of the acronyms of their diagnoses and putting them into a Hip Hop context."

You can see a short scene from "Learn your ABCs," the winning play by Elijah Gaines and Jaleel Lindsay on our WTNJ YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZCDfNVNysY

Writers Theatre of New Jersey's work with the students at Green Residential Community Home and the Craig School is provided in 2016 under a VSA program contract with The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, allowing Writers Theatre to embed teaching artists in the schools and communities. In 2016, Writers Theatre worked with over 30,000 students, reaching almost a quarter of New Jersey public schools through its various educational programs. For more information on all our educational programming, please visit the WTNJ educational overview page, found here:www.wtnj.org/program-descriptions/

For more information on any of our programs, please visit www.wtnj.org

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