Biography
Monica Raymond (Massachusetts) is a poet, playwright, lyricist and librettist. Primarily a poet for the first half of her life, she began auditing courses in performance art while teaching writing and interdisciplinary arts at the Boston Museum School. While she still makes the occasional solo performance piece for herself, she soon realized that she prefers to write scripts for other people. Her first full-length script, FASTER, about the death of a teenage anorexic, got her admitted to Smith College’s under-the-radar MFA program, from which she graduated in 2000. Since then she’s had close to ninety performances or staged readings of her work in the US and Canada.
On April 20th, 2024, Raymond led her workshop Old Stories, New Voices. On May 6th, Raymond gave a reading of her script Four Riffs For a Sailor. Four Riffs For a Sailor is a play that retells the story of the Odyssey through interlocking monologues (and sometimes dialogues) of four women in it – Calypso, Nausicaa, Circe, and Penelope – with no Odysseus, at least not onstage, though he gets talked about.
This programming was supported in part by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gallery
