Contributor Bios

• John Crutchfield is a poet, playwright and performer based in Asheville. His plays Ivory, The Songs of Robert, Everything and God, and Twelve Treatises on Memory have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works. An avid collaborator, he has created and performed interdisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, G. Alex and the Movement, Legacy Butoh, and Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre. He has been Artist-In-Residence at the North Carolina Governor’s School, the Djerassi Artists Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Association d’Art de La Napoule (France), and the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany). He teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and works as a literary translator. More info at: www.johncrutchfield.com
 
• Lucia Del Vecchio First seen onstage in 1984 as Tiny Tim's little sister in A Christmas Carol at the Erie Playhouse, Lucia has been performing, writing, and studying theatre for the last 24 years. She received an MFA in Playwriting and Theatre from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her work has been developed, read and produced in North Carolina (Asheville and Raleigh), Virginia, Texas, Florida, and New York City. Lucia has been seen recently onstage in Asheville in References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Two Rooms and Rock Saber.
 
• Steven Samuels has served as manager of, and occasional actor with, New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company; senior editor of TCG Books and American Theatre magazine; artistic associate at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.; instructor of theater history at New York University; and a judge on the Village Voice Obie committee. The recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts playwrighting fellowship, he edited Charles Ludlam's Complete Plays and Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, and David Kaufman's award-winning biography of Ludlam, Ridiculous! He has taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College and in the Great Smokies Writing Program, and directed a new production of John Crutchfield's The Songs of Robert for performances in Asheville, Boone, and the New York International Fringe Festival. He is also the newly named artistic director of The Magnetic Field, a café, bar, and performance house scheduled to open in the River Arts District's Glen Rock Depot in spring 2010.
 
• Jamie Shell has been a participant in, studier of, and spectator to the performing arts for more than fifteen years. Her daytime acting job involves teaching Spanish to the eager and open minds of adolescents. Jamie loves swing dancing, musicals, sociolinguistics and Tim Gunn.