E. M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French.
She received an Edgerton Award for the world premiere of her epic play Magellanica at Artists Repertory Theater, the Steinberg Award for Song of Extinction and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle for outstanding writing of a world premiere play for Song of Extinction, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Commission, and the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama.
Now Comes the Night was part of the Women's Voices Theater Festival in Washington DC, and was published in the anthology Best Plays from Theater Festivals 2016. The Gun Show has since been produced in more than thirty theaters across the country, as well as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, and was published in The Best American Short Plays 2015-2016 and by Samuel French.
In 2019, Apple Season will have a rolling world premiere at New Jersey Repertory Theater, Riverside Theater, and Moving Arts. How the Light Gets In will have its world premiere at Boston Court Pasadena in the fall of 2019. Other plays by Lewis include: Infinite Black Suitcase, The Study (aka Reading to Vegetables), True Story, and You Can See All the Stars (a play for college students commissioned by the Kennedy Center).
An opera that Lewis wrote with composer Theo Popov will be produced at Willamette University this year, after its debut last year at University of Maryland.
Lewis is currently working on a full-length, family-friendly opera with composer Evan Meier, commissioned by American Lyric Theater, called Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant, and a big, new political play set in her home state of Oregon called The Great Divide. She is a proud member of LineStorm Playwrights and the Dramatists Guild. She lives on her family's farm in Oregon.