John Adams (he/him) is a playwright, short-story author, and improviser from Kansas City. He writes about teenage detectives, pelican-people, robo-butlers, cursed cowboys, and bear nuns in a genre he’s coined “absurdist speculative melodrama” – meaning “monsters being monstrous, aliens being alien, and humans being all too painfully human.” Learn more at https://johnamusesnoone.com/ and on Twitter: @JohnAmusesNoOne.

John's notable short plays include "Some Specter," produced by Whim Productions (2018, Kansas City) and Northwest Missouri State University (2023, Maryville, MO); "The Damp, Dark Room Just Off the Parlor," produced by Whim Productions (2021, Kansas City); "Through the Darkest of Stars, Toward the Brightest of Futures," produced by Grossmont College (2023, El Cajon, CA); "Old Girl," produced by The Barn Players (2016, Mission, KS); and "The Record Don't Stop Spinnin' for Robby Ray Robinson," reading by the Midwest Dramatists Center (2023, Olathe, KS). He's honored to have had his plays accepted twice for the William Inge Theater Festival Playlab (2022 and 2023) and for every Midwest Dramatists Conference to date (2017, 2018, 2019, and 2023).

His short-story publication history includes Archer Publishing, Australian Writers’ Centre, Bowery Gothic, Briefly Write, The Daily Drunk, Dream of Shadows, Fat Cat Magazine, Intrinsick, Macabre Ladies Publishing, Metaphorosis, Outcast Magazine, Paper Butterfly, SERIAL Magazine, Siren’s Call, Speculate This, Suddenly and Without Warning, Trembling With Fear, Triangle Writers Magazine, The Weird and Whatnot, and Weird Christmas. He won the Johnson County Library Imagine Your Story Writing Contest, was Runner-Up in The Shortest Story/The Story Engine’s Microfiction Contest, has been shortlisted by Furious Fiction and The Molotov Cocktail’s Flash Monster Contest, and was a quarter-finalist for the Writing Battle Flash Fiction Battle.

John's greatest strength is his ability to write across multiple genres, thereby bringing new resonance to familiar tropes. His love of genre writing came from his work as a founding member of the comedy improv team, That's No Movie, which has performed in cities across the US since 2015. That's No Movie performs a heavily stylized improvised "movie," providing audiences with an entire film-like experience on stage, using just their minds and bodies to create the characters, dialogue, sets, costumes, special effects, and more. Through rigorous study and practice, John has perfected a range of genres, including space opera, romcom, slasher, secret agent, zombie, Disney Princess, Hitchcock, Nicholas Sparks tearjerker, and Rankin Bass holiday claymation special. He's worked this genre familiarity into many of his writing pieces -- most notably, his plays "Some Specter" (a Hanna Barbera meddling-kids mystery that takes on deeper meaning) and "The Record Don't Stop Spinnin' for Robby Ray Robinson" (a biopic of a Johnny Cash-like figure with a wife who's more than she first appears).