DAVID BRENDAN HOPES

David Brendan Hopes is poet and professor of literature and language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, an actor, painter, and widely produced playwright. He is the author of the Juniper Prize and Saxifrage Prize winning book, The Glacier’s Daughters, and of Blood Rose and A Dream of Adonis.  A Childhood in the Milky Way  (Akron University Press) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Volumes of nature essays, A Sense of the Morning  and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, from Milkweed Editions, followed. His work has appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, Audubon, Christopher Street, Connecticut Review and The Sun.

He has won several important playwriting prizes. Abbott’s Dance (Siena Playwrights Prize Winner, 2003) and Man in Flight were both performed in New York, and The Class of 1950 was premiered in Nashville at the Southern Playwrights Conference. 7 Reece Mews premiered in New York in 2004, and a one-act called Piss appeared at the theater festival in Liverpool, England.

Collaboration with Honora Foah as the lyricist for The Birth of Color, A Marriage of Darkness and Light began when she brought her story and concept to him in 2000.