Mercilee Jenkins is an award winning playwright, poet and fiction writer. Her ten-minute plays, Winning and 50 Love Letters, were winners in the Redwood Writers Play Contest and presented at their Annual Play Festival in May at the 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa, CA. Actors Theatre of Santa Cruz, CA also selected Winning for production in their 2015 Festival. Her full-length play, Spirit of Detroit, was produced in Detroit at The Wright Museum of African American History for Black History Month in February 2014 and premiered at the University of Michigan in 2013. Her full-length play, Ghosts of War received a professional staged reading at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley in 2012. She is also working on a new play entitled The House on Norfolk Street, excerpts of which were performed at Stage Werx and CounterPulse. Her short story, “The Day Mel Tormé Died” was published in the anthology, Sisters Born, Sisters Found. She is a winner of Poets Eleven, the citywide poetry contest in San Francisco for 2015 and published in the anthology of the same name. She presented her poetry in San Francisco’s Lit Crawl 2014 and at the Basement Series sponsored by the Writers Grotto. Previously produced plays include Dangerous Beauty: Love in the Age of Earthquakes and AIDS, A Credit to Her Country, The Two-Bit Tango, Menopause and Desire Or 452 Positions on Love, and She Rises Like a Building to the Sky. She has received grants for her playwriting from the Horizons Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission and the California Institute for Contemporary Art. She also co-edited an anthology of essays and performance pieces entitled Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life. She has been a professor of Communication & Performance Studies at San Francisco State University.