Interview

Kia Corthron is a playwright and novelist. Moon and the Mars, her second novel, was released in August 2021. Her debut, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, was the winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. For her body of work for the stage, she has garnered the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, Horton Foote Prize, Flora Roberts Award, United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, McKnight National Residency, Otto Award for Political Theatre, Lee Reynolds Award, National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Her plays, including A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, Breath, Boom, and Force Continuum, have been produced nationally and internationally. In 2018, she co-produced Imagine: Yemen, an evening of short plays addressing the catastrophe in Yemen and U.S. responsibility for it, leading to an animated short of her musical contribution, the film later screened at the United Nations/U.K. We The Peoples Film Festival in London. Her most recent play is Tempestuous Elements will be produced by D.C.’s Arena Stage in 2022. She serves on the Dramatists Guild Council, is a New Dramatists alumnus, and is a member of the Authors Guild.