Shay Youngblood is an Atlanta based writer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. She has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Eastern Caribbean, as an au pair and poet’s helper in Paris. She is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss (Riverhead Books) and collections of short fiction including The Big Mama Stories (Firebrand Books). Her published plays Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery and Talking Bones, (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Square Blues, Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, an Edward Albee honoree, several NAACP Theater Awards, an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction and a 2004 New York Foundation for the Arts Sustained Achievement Award. Her radio play Special Delivery was commissioned by Westport Country Playhouse in 2021.

Ms. Youngblood received her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and has taught Creative Writing to faculty and graduate students at New York University, The New School and has been Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, Texas A&M University, and the Dallas Museum of Art among many others.

In 2011 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts sponsored Japan-US Creative Artist Fellowship for 2011 to research architecture and memory in support of a five-month residency. She was selected to be a 2018 Fellow for the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe for work on a non-fiction book and she was a China Writers Association writing fellow in October 2018. In 2021 Horizon Theatre in Atlanta selected Youngblood to be a part of the Black Southern Women Speak project, a commission to write a full length play to amplify the voices of Black women and girls and she was a finalist in the Theater for Youth Re/Imagine play competition for Tent Cities, an environmental fable.

Youngblood’s play Square Blues will be produced by Horizon Theatre in July 2022. Her first illustrated children’s books will be published by imprints of Random House, Mama’s Home (Make Me a World, 2022) and A Family Prayer (Convergent, 2023).

She is an artist board member of Yaddo Artist Retreat and in 2021 was appointed Commissioner to the board of the Japan U.S. Friendship Commission. She is currently on the faculty of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at City College, NY.

 

 

 

 

BOSS LADIES & TENDER HEARTED GIRLS, Two Act  (Commission)

A theatrical offering in the form of a manual of tools and techniques for renewal and resistance. Black women create community, model leadership skills, experience uninhibited joy and share ways we have taken care of ourselves, each other, and our communities since ancient times. Set in contemporary Atlanta in 2021, a group of seven Black women sign up for weekly fitness classes led by ARETHA, a former stripper studying for her PhD. The women come together as strangers and over time become family.

SPECIAL DELIVERY, 30 minutes

A radio play comic suspense radio play, inspired by classic ghost stories, about an art courier delivering a strange painting and an angry 11 year old boy to a mysterious art collector his estranged uncle to house with a bizarre art collection.

WIDOWS OF AMERICA, DENTON COUNTY, Two Act

This play series, a comic drama with a dash of noir features Elma Goodnight Liebowitz a retired African American research librarian, newly widowed, returns to the place she had her last good time, a small college town in North Texas, home of one of the last Daughter's of the Confederacy. Not every member of the Widows of America Club is a widow, some of them just want to be

AMAZING GRACE, Full length (commission)

Adaptation of a children’s picture book about a young girl who acts out the characters from storybooks and tales told to her by her West Indian Grandmother.

SHAKIN' THE MESS OUTTA MISERY, Two Act Play

A coming of age story about a young African American girl raised by eight plus older women who introduce her into womanhood with stories, rituals and song.

TALKING BONES 90 minute one act

Three generations of African American women hear the voices of the ancestors through talking bones and whispers in the air. Set in in a bookstore cafe, the women feed the souls of all who come there.

SQUARE BLUES, Two Act

Art activists,  interracial couples and a contemporary revolutionary use a colorful epic wall mural,  the blues, rituals and dreams to discover intergenerational influence in their lives.

BLACK POWER BARBIE IN HOTEL DE DREAM, Two Act

The children of murdered African American revolutionaries remember painful memories in therapy sessions.

COMMUNISM KILLED MY DOG, Two Act

A contemporary farce about expatriates, political exiles, immigrants and illegal aliens set in an urban, funeral parlor.