a.k. payne

2025 Winner

Furlough’s Paradise

Synopsis: Cousins Sade and Mina, raised like sisters but now leading very different lives, return to their childhood town for the funeral of their mother and aunt. While Sade is on a three-day furlough from prison and Mina experiences a brief reprieve from her career and life on the West Coast, the two try to make sense of grief, home, love, and kinship. Traumas and resentments from the past, both real and surreal, threaten to pull them apart, all as time ticks towards the correctional officer’s arrival.

Cast Breakdown: 2 Black people who see themselves and their communities in narratives of Black girlhood, 20s-30s

Website

Agent: Jamie Kaye-Phillips, Paradigm Talent Agency, jkayephillips@paradigmagency.com

Bio: a.k. payne (they&she) is a playwright, artist-theorist, and theatermaker with roots in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their plays love on and engage the interdependencies of Black pasts, presents and futures and seek to find/remember language that might move us towards our collective liberation(s). They hold a B.A. in English and African-American Studies from Yale College and an MFA in Playwriting under Tarell Alvin McCraney from fka Yale School of Drama. A 2023-2024 Van Lier New Voices Fellow, their work has been a finalist for the L. Arnold Weissberger New Play Award and a 3x finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the largest international prize for women+ playwrights. Their work has been developed with the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The New Harmony Project, Great Plains Theater Conference, and Manhattan Theater Club‘s “Groundworks Lab.”  She is currently a resident artist/fellow with National Black Theatre’s I AM SOUL Playwrights Residency and Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh Foundation). They are a proud graduate of Pittsburgh Public Schools; grandchild of the U.S. Great Migration; descendant of a music teacher and a carpenter, who both march every year with their unions in Pittsburgh’s Labor Day parade; an nb & genderqueer abolitionist affected in community by the ‘New Jim Crow;’ and of a great lineage of Blackwomen storytellers and living-room archivists; all of which deeply informs, uplifts and amplifies their work as a playwright, community organizer and spacemaker.