Writer in Residence Berni Stapleton
The Department of English and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences are delighted to announce the appointment of Berni Stapleton as Memorial University’s Writer-in-Residence for 2019-2020. To welcome Berni to the campus, there will be an inaugural reading of her one-act Woman in a Monkey Cage on Thursday, September 12 in the Suncor Energy Hall. The reading will begin at 7:30 p.m.;, and activities related to the Residency will be announced afterwards. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend.
Berni is one of Newfoundland’s most important – and busiest – playwrights and performers. A new musical for which she wrote the script, No Change in the Weather, will be touring across Canada this fall. With Nicole Leona Smith, she’s just completed a summer of work on Mill Girls, a play in development dramatizing the World-War-2 recruitment of Newfoundland women to work in woolen mills in Cambridge, Ontario. Her play Dolly won the 2018 Arts and Letters Award for Best Dramatic Script. Her tragedy Offensive to Some was revived last winter in a stunning new production by Persistence Theatre. Last spring she published transVersing with Breakwater Books: the play, which she assembled in collaboration with Sharon King-Campbell, an MA candidate in the Department of English, is a montage of monologues written by members of the trans community of St. John’s. Berni’s inexhaustible energy and her political and artistic commitment will be priceless gifts to the university community.