In April 2015, we will host playwright Sheri Wilner for a week-long residency as our 2015 Douglass Wallop Fellow. This is the first year we opened up the Douglass Wallop Fellowship as a nationwide competition and Sheri was selected from a pool of more than 40 outstanding applicants. As part of her duties while in-residence, Sheri will hold one-on-one meetings with a select group of student playwrights.  She will also participate in two public events, giving a craft talk and a reading of her work.

Sheri Wilner has twice been a co-winner of the prestigious Heideman Award granted by the Actors Theatre of Louisville: in 1998 for Labor Day, which premiered at the 1999 Humana Festival, and in 2001 for Bake Off, which premiered at the 2002 Humana Festival. Bake Off was heralded by The New York Times for being a “barbed, witty, thoughtful, giggle and snort inducing satire on gender roles” that was “the clear apex” of the festival. Her work has been published in over a dozen anthologies, and Playscripts.com has published twelve of her one-acts, which have received over two hundred productions all over the United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, United Kingdom and India. Her playwriting awards include a Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, a Bush Artist Fellowship and two Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowships. She attended Cornell University and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. At Columbia, she was named Assistant to Andrei Serban, who she assisted for two subsequent years, serving as a dramaturg on his productions of Cymbeline in Central Park, Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Merchant of Venice at American Repertory Theatre, among others.

The Douglass Wallop Fellowship at The Rose O’Neill Literary House is awarded biennially to a playwright. The Fellowship enables drama students at Washington College to work with and learn from successful playwrights like J.T. Rogers and KJ Sanchez, who spend several days on campus. The Fellowship is named for the American novelist and playwright Douglass Wallop (1920-1985). He was the author of 13 works, the most famous being The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (1954), which went on to be adapted by Wallop and co-writer George Abbott into the Tony Award-winning musical “Damn Yankees.” Wallop himself graduated from the University of Maryland and for many years lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.