2007/2008 L.A. Writers' Workshop

The 2007/2008 Writers' Workshop participants include Ricardo A. Bracho, Paul Grellong, Cody Henderson, Rolin Jones, Josslyn Luckett, T.D. Mitchell, Lina Patel, Kate Rigg, and Alexander Woo.

Ricardo A. Bracho

Ricardo A. Bracho is an award-winning writer (plays, essays, the occasional poem), teacher (community and university), organizer (for youth, queers, the incarcerated, brown and black peoples; against empire and the state); editor and dramaturg. He is a committed homosexual and a lifelong Marxist.

Paul Grellong

Paul Grellong’s plays include Manuscript; Warfare; Power of Sail; and Radio Free Emerson (Winner: 2008 Elliot Norton Award from the Boston Theater Critics Association for Outstanding New Script). Manuscript was produced at the Daryl Roth Theatre by Daryl Roth and Scott Rudin. Radio Free Emerson was commissioned and produced by Rhode Island's Gamm Theatre. His plays have been read and workshopped at Center Theatre Group, MCC, Trinity Repertory Company, DR2 Theatre, Symphony Space, Echo Theater Company, and the Cape Cod Theatre Project. Television credits include: Scorpion, Revolution, Terra Nova, and Law & Order: SVU. Paul lives in Los Angeles, where he is an alumnus of the Playwrights Union.

Cody Henderson

Plays include: Wonderlust (Theatre of NOTE), The Lawn (Ojai Playwrights Conference, writer in residence; Redwood Curtain, Eureka, Ca), Cold/Tender (The Theatre @ Boston Court), The Bewildered Herd (development: Center Theatre Group), Carrots for Hare (Ghost Road Co./Powerhouse Theatre), Pacific Daylight (Theatre of NOTE), and several LA Phil "Symphony for Youth" scripts. Development: New York Stage and Film, Center Theatre Group, Ojai Playwrights Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre—L.A., A.S.K. Theatre Projects, Theatre of NOTE, The Blank Theatre Co., California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA), and Cypress College. Cody’s writing has been nominated for L.A. Weekly and Garland Awards, and Cold/Tender received an O.C. Weekly Award for "Best New Play." He has an MFA in playwriting and a BFA in acting from CalArts.

Rolin Jones

Rolin Jones' play The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. It received the 2006 Obie Award for Excellence in Playwriting. Productions of Jenny Chow include: South Coast Repertory, Old Globe Theatre, Yale Repertory, Studio Theatre (DC), Atlantic Theater Company (NYC), Portland Center Stage, San Jose Repertory, among others. His full-length play The Jammer received a Fringe First Award for Best New Writing at 2004's Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was also produced at the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival. He has written several short plays for the Actors Theater of Louisville's Humana Festival, including Sovereignty, Ron Robby Had Too Big a Heart, The Mercury and the Magic, Extremely, and Chronicles Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass. All of these were recently produced together under the title Shortstack at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre. Mr. Jones has been a writer/producer for Showtime's award-winning series Weeds.

Josslyn Luckett

Josslyn Luckett was an Executive Story Editor/Staff writer for four seasons of the WB comedy The Steve Harvey Show. Her original feature screenplay Love Song was directed by Julie Dash and aired on MTV. In 2002 Filmmaker Magazine included her in their annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" issue. Her plays, Rupture Runnin' Through Risk Runnin' to Bliss and Chronicles of a Comic Mulatta: an oreo/choreopoem have been performed at the Public Theater, the Walnut Street Theater, and The National Black Theater Festival in North Carolina. Selections from her new solo show Loving/Imitation were performed at REDCAT and workshopped recently in a nine-month playwriting workshop at the Center Theater Group. Company of Angels in L.A. commissioned and produced her latest play: Like Her Shanti Doesn’t Stink: Black Women Eye to Iyengar in February 2009. Her essays/poetry have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Ishmael Reed's Konch Magazine, Voices from Leimert Park Anthology (Tsehai Press), and What Your Mama Never Told You: True Stories about Sex and Love (Houghton Mifflin). She has a BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, and an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School where in 2011 she won the Billings Preaching Prize. In 2012, Josslyn was included in Harvard's Hip Hop Archive Lecture series, "Is it Something I Said: Spirituality, Morality and Religion in Hip Hop," and she also had the distinct honor of participating in BLEED, where she preached a sermon on the Good News of Stevie Wonder, on day 2 of Jason and Alicia Hall Moran's five-day residency at the Whitney Biennial. She is a Hedgebrook alum and proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, Texas founded by Sandra Cisneros.

T.D. Mitchell

Best known as writer and story editor for the acclaimed TV series Army Wives, T.D. Mitchell's award-winning play scripts include A Gray Matter, In Dog Years, Beyond the 17th Parallel (being adapted as a feature film), and Queens For A Year (World premiere at Hartford Stage, Septemer 2016). A prominent speech writer for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations (US Fund for UNICEF, Feminist Majority, the Rolex Institute, ex.), her travelogue essays for Verbal Supply Company and, next year, a nonfiction book, exemplify her multi-format, cross-genre passion for storytelling.

Lina Patel

Lina was born in Mumbai and grew up in Los Angeles and Texas. She studied theatre at New York University and the University of San Diego. Lina’s plays have been developed, produced, or commissioned by Yale Repertory Theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, New Harmony Project, The New Group, The Lark Play Development Center (Playwrights Week), East West Players, Circle X Theater, The Japanese American Museum, and Chalk Repertory Theater. She is a Walter E. Dakin Fellow with the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. In Center Theatre Group's Writers' Workshop, Lina developed her play about fractures of the heart and colonialism, The Ragged Claws. The play was nominated for Cherry Lane Theatre's Mentor Project by David Henry Hwang. Lina is an NEA Grant recipient for her experimental musical play, The Half-Breed Spy, or How I Learned to Love Imperialists, developed by Circle X Theater in Atwater Village. Recently, Lina has been writing for television. She is also a critically acclaimed actor and voice-over artist.

Kate Rigg

At the University of Toronto, Kate won 2 Norma Epstein Creative Writing Awards before moving to Australia to finish her degree in culture and creative writing at the University of Melbourne where she graduated in the English program with Honors and won their Experimental Writing Award. While in school, she also won an Australia Council Creative Development Grant to create her first multimedia play, mOTHERland, a Best of Fringe Award, and Melbourne International Comedy Fest Monologue Award. Kate has created plays, television programs, and been the senior creative on several high profile branding projects including the HP rebrand, The Whitney Museum membership re-brand, the Sony Rewards campaign and a creating/producing/hosting a series of weekly branded fashion and performance events at Soho House New York. While in the acting program at the Juilliard School of Drama (Dip. Acting) She won the Interarts Award, a Summer Projects Grant and Interarts Grant to finish mOTHERland. She also published Sinta of Jakarta, a verse play with Prism Press in Vancouver, and had mOTHERland produced at the Tarragon theater in Toronto and at Studio 301 at the Juilliard. The first workshop of her full-length musical Pictures of Dorian Gray written with Julliard colleague composer Lance Horne was invited to the National Music Theater Conference at the ONeill Playwrights Center, and received 20 hour workshop at Manhattan Theater Club. Their two short operas, A Suite for Fat Girls and Club Kid Cantata premiered at the Clarke Studio Theater at Lincoln Center. Dorian Gray is in development with Second Stage Theater. Their musical Back in the Day was commissioned and performed at the Cape Cod Rep as part of their mainstage season. Based on her performances in comedy clubs around the USA and Canada, Kate's ChinkORama:featuring the Chinkorama dancers premiered at Here Theater Center, then played at the NY Fringe Fest, Buddies in Bad Times Theater in Toronto, the HBO Time Warner Workspace in L.A., Joe's Pub at the New York's Public Theater, the Brava Theater Center San Francisco, and continues to tour the country. Birth of a nASIAN, a cycle of monologues and songs was part of the Jerome Foundation's New Work Series was workshopped in Minneapolis, Toronto, at La Mama ETC, and in readings at Asian Theater Workshop's Summerfest at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A, before going on to being performed at New World Theater in Massachussetts, the Vancouver Comedy Festival, the Women in Theater Conference Toronto, ConWorks in Seattle, OutNorth in Anchorage, MACLA, CCE Portland, and the Comedy Central Theater in L.A where it was taped for their online portal. It was also performed as a special event for the Smithsonian Institute's Asian Heritage Month Programs. Her play about Asian adoptees, The Phoenix Rides a Skateboard was commissioned by Theater Direct Canada, was produced at Theater Passe Muraille in Toronto, and was published by Schillingford Press and excerpted for a monologue book called Shakin the Stage for young actors. It was also produced in Romania By Nottara theater and is a popular play produced in high schools. Kate was commissioned by Center Theater Group's P.L.A.Y. program to write Dinner 101, a multimedia play for high school age actors which was produced by Center Theatre Group at Birmingham High School's Arts Center. She was also invited to be part of the Writers' Workshop at Center Theatre Group where she wrote Hungry Ghosts. Her play re:Mix't: was commissioned by East West Players and was performed throughout L.A. County schools. Her play Happy Lucky Golden Tofu Panda Dragon Good Time Fun Fun Show was premiered at La Mama ETC, played to sold out crowds at the NY Fringe Festival, and was made into a movie, which premiered at the Soho International Film Festival and played festivals around the country including The Broad Humor Festival in Los Angeles where it won Best Feature.

Alexander Woo

Alexander Woo. Photo by John P. Johnson.

Alexander Woo is a playwright, screenwriter, and writer/producer for television. He served as Executive Producer on HBO's True Blood, earning an Emmy® nomination, two Golden Globe nominations, and two NAACP Image Award nominations. He has also created number of pilot projects, including Headhunters for HBO, Bombingham for AMC, and Hellhound On His Trail for FX. His other staff credits include the Emmy-nominated Showtime series Sleeper Cell, the NBC series LAX, the FOX series Wonderfalls and the WGN America series Manhattan. On film, he developed the screen adaptation of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks at HBO. His stage plays include The New York Times-acclaimed Forbidden City Blues (Pan Asian Rep), In the Sherman Family Wax Museum (Circle X), and Debunked (Triad Stage). He lives in Los Angeles with his family and a very famous cat.