Rapp, Adam

Adam Rapp is a novelist, filmmaker, and an OBIE Award-winning playwright and director. He has been the recipient of the Herbert H. and Patricia M. Brodkin Scholarship; two Lincoln Center LeCompte du Nouy Awards; a fellowship to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; the1999 Princess Grace Award for Playwriting; the 2000 Roger L. Stevens Award from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays; a 2000 suite residency with Mabou Mines; the 2001 Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights; and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Award. He also was short-listed for the 2003 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.His plays include Nocturne (Art Repertory Theatre [A.R.T.], Cambridge, Massachusetts; Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop), Ghosts in the Cottonwoods (Victory Gardens, Chicago; Arcola Theatre, London), Animals and Plants (A.R.T.), Blackbird (Bush Theatre, London; City Theatre, Pittsburgh; Off-Broadway with Edge Theater), Stone Cold Dead Serious (A.R.T.; Off-Broadway with Edge Theater), Finer Noble Gases (26th Annual Humana Festival of New American Plays; Off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), Faster (Off-Broadway at Rattlestick), Trueblinka (Off-Broadway at the Maverick Theater), Dreams of the Salthorse (Encore, San Francisco), Gompers (City Theatre; Arcola Theatre), and Red Light Winter (Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago; Off-Broadway with Scott Rudin Productions at the Barrow Street Theatre).His first anthology of plays, Plays by Adam Rapp, is published by Broadway Play Publishing. Another collection of plays, Stone Cold Dead Serious and Other Plays, is available in a trade edition by Faber and Faber.His production of Blackbird (Edge Theater), which he directed, received two Drama Desk nominations. His production of Red Light Winter was the first play to completely sell out Steppenwolf's Garage Theatre and won the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work. It is currently running at the Barrow Street Theater and recently received a Citation from the American Theatre Critics Association. It also received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for Best New Play and two OBIE Awards, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Red Light Winter is available in a trade edition from Faber and Faber.His first feature film, Winter Passing, starring Ed Harris, Will Ferrell, and Zooey Deschanel, received its world premiere as an Official Selection of the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in February 2006. He is currently in post-production with his second feature, Blackbird, which he adapted from his play.He is the author of the award-winning young adult novels Missing the Piano, The Buffalo Tree, The Copper Elephant, Little Chicago, 33 Snowfish, and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog.Upcoming projects include the graphic novel Decelerate Blue for the new imprint First Second, and the adult novel The Year of Endless Sorrows, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in January 2007. His new play, Essential Self-Defense, will receive its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in the spring of 2007.A graduate of Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he majored in fiction writing and psychology, Mr. Rapp also completed a two-year playwriting fellowship at Juilliard. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, and makes his home in New York City.