National Latino Playwriting Award

Submissions are now open for ATC's 2016 National Latino Playwriting Award!

For submission details, please contact ATC Literary Associate Katherine Monberg at kmonberg@aztc.org or 520.884.8210 x7508.


Matthew Paul Olmos' the livin' life of the daughter mira Wins 2015 National Latino Playwriting Award

Congratulations to Matthew Paul Olmos' the livin' life of the daughter mira, the winner of ATC's 2015 National Latino Playwriting Award.  Olmos crafts a story that weaves across time and generations as the premature baby Mira looks to her Labor and Delivery nurse as a mother figure, while she struggles to survive her first challenging weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit.  Meanwhile, Mira’s teenaged mother and uncompromising family clash as Mira’s father struggles to keep a promise, made to his unborn daughter on a mysterious beach, in an aging blue Chevy Cassanova van.

ATC Playwright-in-Residence Elaine Romero says, “Our judges were struck by the rich language and impressed by the original world carved out in Matthew Paul Olmos’s new work, the livin’life of the daughter mira. They particularly admired the plasticity of time and space in the piece, and how the play continually tracked the unexpected. The play does all this while remaining rooted in the trueness of its characters. We wholeheartedly believe that Matthew Paul Olmos is a playwright to watch and it is our honor to acknowledge him.”

Matthew Paul Olmos is a three-time recipient of the Sundance Institute Fellowship/Residency, a New Dramatists Resident Playwright, a 2015 Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artist, an Awardee of the Princess Grace Award in Playwriting, and the inaugural recipient of La Mama e.t.c.’s Ellen Steward Emerging Playwright Award (selected by Sam Shepard), among many other awards and accolades.  His work has been produced in theatres across the country, and he is currently at work on the drinking of an un’happy people about American nationalism, and the third play in a three-play cycle so go the ghosts of mexico which focuses on the U.S./Mexico drug wars.  Mr. Olmos was also the co-founder and former Artistic Director of woken’glacier theatre company and is a member of NoPassport with Caridad Svich, a reader for the NEA’s New Play Development, and a regular essayist for The Brooklyn Rail’s “In Dialogue” series and the New York Theatre Review.


Kristiana Colon's Octagon Wins 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award




Congratulations to Kristiana Colón's Octagon, the unlikely story of eight young poets' win-at-all-costs and damn-the-consequences approach to the three-minute competition of a poetry slam, and the winner of the 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award.

"The judges savored the rich linguistic tapestry of Kristiana Colón's exciting new play, Octagon," said ATC Playwright-in-Residence Elaine Romero.  "Theatre and poetry slam together is the theatrical equivalent of spontaneous combustion in this new play that looks at the personal and the political and how tough it can be to parse the two."

Runner-up for the 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award is Mario Correa's Commander, the story of an ambitious politician battling public doubts, personal demons and his alcoholic partner in a troubled quest to become America's first openly gay president.  Set very much in the current day, Commander explores the outer limits of tolerance; what Americans will tolerate from those who lead us, and what human beings will tolerate from those who love us.

"The judges are honored to recognize Mario Correa's sharp political drama, Commander," Romero said.  "A play of this moment." 


About the National Latino Playwriting Award


The winner of the National Latino Playwriting Award receives $1,000 and the possible inclusion of the winning play in Café Bohemia, ATC's unique new play reading series.  Previous winners featured in Café Bohemia include Ghetto Babylon  by Michael Mejias (2012); and Spark by Caridad Svich (2013).

Other recent recipients of the Award include Marisela Treviño Orta, Edwin Sanchez, Raul Garza, Carlos Murrillo, and Karen Zacarias. Felix Pire's winning play, The Origins of Happiness in Latin, was produced by ATC; previous winner Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 and has enjoyed multiple successful productions around the country; and the 2013 recipient, Ghetto Babylon by Michael Mejias, received rave reviews in its world premiere production last summer at Off-Broadway’s 59E59. 


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