History Matters Awards Sallie Bingham Grant

Not-for-profit History Matters: Celebrating Women's Plays of the Past has announced the recipients of its 2023 Sallie Bingham Grant, a monetary award granted to support a faculty-mentored student-directed reading series or full production of a play or plays by a historic female playwright. Four (4) $2000 grants will be awarded, with an additional $500 stipend for the faculty advisor of each project. 

The grant is to be applied towards a faculty mentored student-directed reading series or full production of a play or plays written by a female playwright prior to 1965. The grant is awarded by History Matters: Celebrating Women’s Plays of the Past, a non- profit organization that promotes the study and production of women’s plays of the past in colleges, universities, and theatres throughout the country and encourages responses to those plays from contemporary playwrights. The grant is named in honor of Sallie Bingham, a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist who made a generous gift to History Matters towards the furthering of the company’s mission. 

This year’s awardees are: Lauren Carn from University of Utah with an audio production of Susan Glaspell’s The Verge (Faculty advisor: Lynn Deboeck, PhD);  Sofía Ruiz Carrera from University of Georgia with a production of Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure (Faculty advisor: George Michael Contini); Priya Dahiya from Carnegie Mellon University with a production of Four Plays In Two Acts: Selected Works by Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Plath (Faculty advisor: Paul Peers); and Tianding He from University of California, Irvine and University of California, San Diego with a production of Madame Rachilde’s Pleasure (Faculty advisor: Ian Munro, PhD). 

“In the years since I first learned about and began to support History Matters, I’ve seen this project grow and bloom, reaching new audiences, saving from oblivion important, inspiring—and forgotten—plays from the long and noble history of women playwrights,” says Sallie Bingham. 

Sallie Bingham is a writer, teacher, feminist activist, and philanthropist. Sallie’s first novel was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1961. It was followed by four collections of short stories; her most recent, from Sarabande Books in 2014, is titled The Blue Box: Three Lives In Letters. She has also published six additional novels, three collections of poetry, numerous plays (produced off-Broadway and regionally), and the well-known family memoir, Passion and Prejudice (Knopf, 1989). Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Letters, Plainswoman, Plainsong, Greensboro Review, Negative Capability, The Connecticut Review, and Southwest Review, among others, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Forty Best Stories from Mademoiselle, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virgin- ia Center for the Creative Arts. Sallie has worked as a book editor for The Courier- Journal in Louisville and has been a director of the National Book Critics Circle. She is founder of the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which published The American Voice, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. She was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.