Charlene Redick is the author of Autumn Elegy - (The Humana Festival of New American Plays l989; the Williamstown Theatre Festival 1989; published by Samuel French.) Her plays have been produced in the United States, Germany, Denmark, Canada, and Korea. She has been nominated for the Susan Blackburn Prize by Julie Harris, the actor, and won the Dayton Future Fest Prize and the American Express/Fund for New Plays/Kennedy Center Award.
Ms. Redick is a practicing playwright, poet and fiction writer. She teaches writing and offers unstinting support to new plays, new fiction, and to other artists, including her private writing students and the students in her playwriting, fiction and screenwriting workshops.
She won the Coffee House verse competition at Huntingdon College, Montgomery, Alabama in 1974, for her poem about an African American sharecropper, The Passing of James. She has placed as a finalist or semi-finalist in many playwriting and fiction writing competitions. She won third place in The Hackney Award Competition at Birmingham Southern College-Writing Today Festival in 2007 for her story, In Eternity's Sunrise, and enjoyed a staged reading of her play, A Sonnet for Sarajevo at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Southern Writers Project. She has written a novella. The Pilgrimage (unpublished) about two young people on their way to college at Yale and the University of Alabama who, before going off to school, travel to Monroeville, Alabama in search of inspiration from Harper Lee (a fellow Alabama writer and the illustrious author of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird). She has turned this novella into a stage play with great success. She is the recipient of two writing grants from the Alabama Council of the Arts, and the Kathryn Woodruff Scholarship in Fiction Writing from the University of Tennessee/Knoxville.
Her plays have won much recognition and been translated into several languages. The European premier of Autumn Elegy took place at Det Dansk Teatre /Copenhagen, where Birgitte Federspiel, (Babette’s Feast) played the lead. Other productions have been at The Dayton Playhouse, The Artists Repertory Theatre of Portland, Oregon, The Bangor Playhouse, Theatre at Long Beach, Dungeon Theatre /Huntington College (Providence Convent), TheatreAUM (Holding Back the Night), and staged in readings at The Atlanta New Play Project (Autumn Elegy), The Playwrights’ Fund of North Carolina (Moving North), The Southern Writers' Project at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (A Sonnet for Sarajevo), The George Street Playhouse (with the acting students at the Mason Gross School for the Arts at Rutgers) Autumn Elegy, Holding Back the Night; The Princeton Repertory(The Confinement); Theatre-Three Dallas (Assault and Assuagement), Octoberfest at Ensemble Studio Theatre/New York (The Confinement- directed by Pamela Berlin); Alice's Fourth Floor/New York (Holding Back the Night - with the undergraduate acting students at Yale).
Autumn Elegy won critical acclaim at the Humana Festival (With Carmen Matthews, Gwyllum Evans and Barbara Gulan in the leading roles) and at the Williamstown Theater Festival with Ruth Nelson (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), E.G. Marshall (Nixon) and Allison Daugherty (When Bees in Honey Drown). It has toured Denmark, Canada, the German speaking countries in Europe, and Seoul, Korea.
Ms. Redick has taught playwriting at Auburn University/Montgomery and many fiction writing and screenwriting workshops. She has spoken and lectured on the writer and the writing process many times.
She has several works forthcoming: A major project, a novel, Hard: an Odyssey of Fateful and Momentous Consequences is set in the beach town of Destin, Florida, and is the story of a retired civil rights lawyer, suffering from erectile dysfunction, who embarks upon an existential odyssey across Florida in an effort to rediscover his sexual potency. Her newest play, The Church Fantastic, explores abuse, banishment and shunning in congregational life. Her most recent fiction project is a story collection, Auburn: Stories of Love, War and Religion in a Southern College Town. Her most recent poetry collections are Men of My Heart, At This Age, We Are Not Lovers and Never Have Been and Learning to Walk the Line.
Ms. Redick lives on the Florida Panhandle.