Monica Raymond is a prize-winning poet and playwright. She is committed to writing plays which use humor, surprise, and deep feeling to make us question our preconceptions and move towards greater freedom, courage, and peace. She is a Jerome Fellow for 2008-09 at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, and was a finalist in the 2006 Massachusetts Cultural Council awards in Playwriting. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and has received grants from the Book of the Month Club, the Cambridge Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Raymond’s plays include The Owl Girl, about two families in the Middle East who both have keys to the same house (Clauder Gold Medal 2006; Little Festival of the Unexpected 2007, Portland Stage); Safe House (Panelists Choice Award, Last Frontier Theater Conference; O’Neill Finalist); Creche (Boston Playwrights Platform prize; published in Dramatic Publishing’s anthology 35 in 10); Lindsay (Subversive Theater, 2005 Montreal and NYC Infringement Festivals); Novices (Centastage Plays on Tap, Boston Theatre Marathon 2008) and many others. Her short play Hijab has been performed widely, including at the 2007 Boston Theater Marathon, the Vital Theater (NYC), the Samuel French Festival, and as part of “Occupied Territories: Palestinian- and Jewish-American Plays about the Middle East� at Boston Playwrights Theatre.

Raymond hosted a panel “Making Theatre about Palestine/ Israel� at the 2005 Conference of the Association for Theater in Higher Education, and toured as a performer in An Olive on the Seder Plate, a play by and for American Jews about human rights in Israel/Palestine. She has performed her own monologues and performance scores at Mobius, the Boston Museum School, and as part of Joe Chaikin's "Disability Project� at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Raymond holds degrees from the University of Chicago (BA Humanities), Columbia University (MA English) and Smith College (MFA Theatre/Playwriting) and has taught writing and literature at Harvard, CUNY, and the Boston Museum School.

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THE OWL GIRL

Two families in an unnamed country both have keys to the same house. What happens when they try to live in it together? The fathers play historical chess; the mothers cook together, even though one uses mint and the other dill; the lovers dare to imagine a future; and war mad children play doctor and murder. But when one girl's dreams of flight are (literally) shot down, betrayals and realignments occur which make us question our very definition of peace.