Kimberly Dixon-Mays is a poet, playwright and performer. As a playwright, she has received readings and staged productions at Crossroads Theatre Company, Plowshares Theatre Company, Emotive Fruition, Windy City Playhouse, Strawdog Theatre Company and Chicago Dramatists where she is current Tutterow Fellow. An excerpt of her play Clarke, Kubrick & Promises was selected by blind judging for the Scene Shop Showcase at Chicago Dramatists ‘19 (judge Kathy Scambiatterra, Artistic Director, The Artistic Home). Her play The Gizzard of Brownsville was a finalist for the Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights. (Nine) was a featured reading for Congo Square Theatre Company’s August Wilson New Play Initiative, and a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. She is also a 2018-19 Chicago Dramatists Tutterow Fellow. As a poet, Kimberly is a Cave Canem, Callaloo and Ragdale fellow, and her poetry has been published in journals including Reverie, Anthology of Chicago, the anthology Trigger Warning, Uproot magazine, Rhino magazine (finalist, Founder’s Prize, 2018) and Consequence magazine (finalist, Prize in Poetry, ‘14). She also released her first poetry collection, SenseMemory, with Blue Pantry Publishers and has developed a second collection More Than a Notion: Reflections on (Black) Marriage. Starting in 2005 she was a recurring performer with the Guild Literary Complex’s collaborative writing/performance project the Poetry Performance Incubator led by director Coya Paz, co-creating and appearing in its original works Tour Guides and Like Bread. Kimberly also became Executive Director of the Guild Literary Complex in 2010, producing the Incubator as well as several other literary events and programs around Chicago. She holds a B.A. Psychology/Theater Studies from Yale University an M.A. in Afro-American Studies (playwriting concentration) from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Theatre/Drama from Northwestern University.