Barbara Seyda Wins the 2015 Yale Drama Series Prize

The 2015 Yale Drama Series Prize will be awarded to Barbara Seyda for her play Celia, A Slave: 26 Characters Testify. She was selected by playwright Nicholas Wright, who serves as judge for the 2015 and 2016 competitions. This year’s runners-up are Craig Thornton for The High Cost of Heating and Abe Koogler for Kill Floor.

"I’m thrilled to choose Barbara Seyda’s play for the 2015 Yale Drama Series," says Wright. "My reason for rating the play so highly was the thick lump of pain that it placed in my chest and that I carried around with me for days afterwards. I had a completely primitive and intuitive reaction to the tragedy of the story and to the whole of life, in a way."

Celia, A Slave: 26 Characters Testify is based on the trial transcripts and court records from the State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave, file #4496, Callaway County Court, 1855, Fulton, Missouri. At age 19, Celia, a female slave, was accused, convicted, and hanged for killing her 66-year-old master, Robert Newsom, a prosperous Missouri landowner. The play is a tableau of interviews with the dead.

Now in its ninth year, the Yale Drama Series Prize is given out annually for a play by an emerging playwright, selected by a preeminent playwright of our time. The winner receives the David Charles Horn Prize of $10,000, as well as publication of the winning play by Yale University Press and a staged reading at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater. The Yale Drama Series is an annual international open submission competition among original, unpublished, full-length, English-language plays. Seyda’s play was selected from 1,478 entries from 47 countries.