Teaching

The work I create seeks to build connections between ourselves, encourage empathy, wrestle with the unknowns, and inspire creative communities.

As a playwright and storyteller, my work seeks to connect disconnected worlds, communities, and individuals, and to invite audiences to peer past the limits of our own experience, to authentically expand into the world of another, to question what is narrow inside us, and engage with empathy.

Teaching

John currently serves as a professor and head of the M.F.A. program in playwriting and performance at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

During the three-year program, our M.F.A. playwrights learn by doing, and participate in a series of rigorous writing workshops on a variety of topics designed to expand and challenge their theatrical imaginations while building foundational knowledge in dramatic form and structure.

My teaching aims to give writers equal space to focus on their personal process, as they reach toward embracing a fearless form of personal expression—one rooted in deep personal investment while engaging with the larger cultural dialogue their work challenges and confronts. 

M.F.A. playwrights have been produced and workshopped in Edinburgh, Chicago, NYC, Los Angeles, Austin and many points in-between; winning state, national, and international awards; being published, commissioned, and awarded grants and fellowships, as well as being profiled in major publications.

Experience

Along side my own creative work, I have made my career advocating for and championing new work and voices. I began as a community advocate working as the artistic director of Austin Script Works in Austin, where I also began teaching at University of Texas at Austin and the Michener Center for Writer’s. In New York, I was a member of New Dramatists, where I was proudly awarded the Joe Calloway award for exceptional dedication to the craft of playwriting and service to the community.

In addition to UT Austin, I’ve taught playwriting at multiple institutions including, University of Iowa, Florida State, Bennington College, Lincoln Center and detention centers, among others.

My own writing has been fortunate to find recognition by a multitude of awards throughout my career including the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays and the Osborn Award from the American Theatre Critics Association, both acknowledging contributions to contemporary American theatre. My musical DoubleTime with composer Nile Rogers was awarded the Frederick Loewe Award. I was honored to receive the Kennedy Center’s Charlotte Woolard Award, which singles out promising new voices in American Theatre. My work has also been acknowledged with the Marc Klein Playwriting Award, the Hemingway Prize in Playwriting, three Austin Critics Table Awards, and several awards from film festivals.

Additionally I am a two-time recipient of the Sloan Fellowship and was a James Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, where I earned his MFA in Playwriting. I was awarded an Artists 360 Grant to support a new play which I completed in residency at Yaddo.