Kristiana Rae Colón

Poet, playwright, actor, and educator Kristiana Rae Colón earned a BA at the University of Chicago and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of the chapbooks pieces of shedu (2008) and promised instruments (2013), which won the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. Her poems have been included in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010 and the anthologies Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women, a World Poetry Anthology (2009) and Chorus: A Literary (Re)Mixtape (2012). She appeared on the fifth season of HBO's Def Poetry Jam.

An alum of the Goodman Theater's Playwrights Unit, Colón’s plays include florissant & canfield, an epic reimagining of the Ferguson protests, which was featured in the 2016 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival; Octagon, which won the Arizona Theater Company's 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award and Polarity Ensemble Theater's Dionysos Festival of New Work, and had its 2015 world premiere at the Arcola Theater in London; but i cd only whisper, which premiered at The Flea in New York; and good friday which had its world premiere at Oracle Productions. In 2017, Colón was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall.

A Cave Canem fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, she is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools.