TO BE AN EAGLE!
Bookwriter
Terra Ziporyn is a playwright, fiction writer, and the award-winning author of numerous health and science books including The Harvard Guide to Women’s Health and Alternative Medicine for Dummies. Currently a member of the Theatre Building of Chicago’s Writers Workshop, she graduated from Yale University, where she studied playwriting with Ted Tally, and then completed a Ph.D. in the history of science at the University of Chicago. Terra has participated in both the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Old Chatham Writers Conference and has won numerous awards and fellowships for both fiction and science writing, including short story awards from Writer’s Digest Magazine and the Chicago Literary Review, a AAAS Mass Media Science Writing Fellowship, and an Artist Development Grant from the Vermont Council on the Arts. Her plays include Wally’s Playhouse, authored with Jim Hughes and Will Graveman (produced and presented at Theatre Building Chicago) and The Teacup (produced at Yale University).
Composer
A native New Yorker, Lita Grier is an award-winning, Juilliard-trained composer, who has returned to composition after an interlude of more than 30 years. Her music is featured on several Cedille recordings, and includes Renascence for Flute and Orchestra with the Czech National Symphony, which has been described as “[a] new classic in the standard flute repertory,” “Songs from Spoon River,” commissioned by the Ravinia Festival for their Centennial celebration and performed in 2004. The Ravinia Festival recently commissioned Ms. Grier to compose a second song set, based on the same American classic “Spoon River Anthology,” for its 2006 season. Additionally, Ms. Grier is president of InterContinental Media Inc, presently airing a nationally distributed radio series with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, hosted by Jeremy Irons. She has written five works for musical theater, all of which have been produced locally. Three of these have been in collaboration with Susan DiLallo, 2002 winner of the Richard Rogers Prize in musical theater and 2002 Ed Kleban Award, given to the “most promising librettist in American Musical Theatre.”
JIM HUGHES
Lyricist
Playwright and lyricist Jim Hughes’ latest success was the Chicago premiere of his new musical FAITH (co-authored with composer Gerald Rizzer), which premiered at The Theatre Building, Chicago in February 2004 as part of the Monday Night Musicals – a concert reading series. Previous musicals include book & lyrics for FIRE! CODES?, ...AND NOW MIGUEL, THE IRISH PRINCESS, CRAZY LADY, GOLD FEVER, as well as the lyrics for the musical NEVER AGAIN, co-authored with fellow workshop members Terra Ziporyn (book) and Will Graveman (composer). Mr. Hughes is a long-time member of the Musical Theatre Writers’ Workshop.