Students from Columbia College Chicago’s playwrighting classes will present their work, hosted by Lisa Schlesinger and Tom Mula.

Lisa Schlesinger‘s plays include Wal-martyrs, Celestial Bodies, Twenty-One Positions (with Naomi Wallace and Abed Fattah Abusrour), Same Egg, Manny and Chicken, Rock Ends Ahead, Bow Echo, The Bones of Danny Winston, The Go Back Land, and The Artist of Transparency. She is currently at work on Harmonicus Mundi, the second play in her Celestial Bodies trilogy. She has received commissions from the BBC, the Guthrie Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Portland Stage Company. She is a recipient of the NEA/TCG Playwrights Residency Award and winner of the BBC International Playwriting Award, and has received grants and awards from the NEA, CEC International, the Bush Foundation, and the Iowa Arts Council, among others. She has recently published work in American Theatre magazine, Yale University’s Theater magazine, and the Performing Arts Journal. She received her M.F.A.s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop, and is coordinator of the Playwriting Program at Columbia College Chicago.

Tom Mula has been an award-winning playwright, actor, and director for nearly thirty years and has taught in the Theatre Department at Columbia College Chicago as a senior lecturer since 1986. His plays W!, The Golem, and his work on Nicole Hollander’s Sylvia’s Real Good Advice were all recognized by the Joseph Jefferson Committee; he is also the proud author of Almighty Bob. His novel Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol was published in 1995 by Adams Media, and it became a Chicago Tribune bestseller. The audio version was broadcast nationwide on NPR for six seasons; the play received the Cunningham Prize from the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul. It premiered in 1998 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, was Jeff-nominated, and received an After Dark Award. Since then, it has received hundreds of productions nationally and worldwide, including productions in South Africa and Australia. His acting credits include seven seasons as Goodman Theatre’s Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and a Jeff Award for his performance in Hot Mikado. His story “Graven Images” appeared in Hair Trigger 31 and received a Certificate of Merit from the Columbia [University] Scholastic Press Association.