Playwrights’ Center Selects Alumna Gethsemane Herron-Coward ’19 for Jerome Fellowship

The Playwrights’ Center announced nine recipients for the 2021-2022 Jerome Fellowship, including Playwriting alumna Gethsemane Herron-Coward ’19. As a part of this fellowship, Herron-Coward will spend a year in residency at The Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis. This prestigious fellowship is a rare opportunity for playwrights to develop their art alongside the Playwrights' Center artistic staff. The fellowship includes workshops with professional directors, dramaturgs, and actors. Jerome Fellows build connections with producers of new work and for many, it is a career changing fellowship.

The Jerome Fellowship is intended to support early career playwrights who demonstrate extraordinary potential and artistic vision. Each fellow receives an $18,000 stipend and $2,500 in play development funds to workshop new plays with professional directors, dramaturgs, and actors. In a statement about Herron-Coward and her fellow Jerome Fellowship members, Playwrights’ Center associate Martine Kei Green-Rogers said, “This group of amazing artists represent the new frontier on how to push the boundaries of theatrical storytelling—calling for a new definition of how ‘form meets function and content.’”

Gethsemane Herron-Coward is a poet-turned-playwright from Washington, D.C. She has developed work with JAG Productions, The Hearth, Magic Time! at Judson, and Playwright’s Playground at Classical Theatre of Harlem. She is an alumna of 24:Hour Plays-Nationals, the Fire This Time Festival, and VONA. Her past residencies include the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, NYFA, and the Millay Colony, where she was the recipient of the Yasmin Scholarship. She was a semi-finalist for the Many Voices Fellowship at Playwrights’ Center, Rising Circle INKtank and the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, and a finalist for Space on Ryder Farm and the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. She holds a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild. Herron-Coward’s play Falling Man was selected as one of the winners at the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Play Festival.

Check out the Meet the Playwrights interview with Herron-Coward online.