JANET BURROWAY is the author of plays, poetry, essays, and eight novels including Pulitzer-nominated The Buzzards, Raw Silk (recently re-released by Open Road Media), Opening Nights, Cutting Stone, and Bridge of Sand. Her textbooks Writing Fiction (the most widely used creative writing textbook in America) and Imaginative Writing, are in 9th and 4th editions respectively.
Recent plays include Sweepstakes, Media With Child, and Parts of Speech, and Boomerang, which have received readings and productions in New York, London, San Francisco, Hollywood, and Chicago, Boomerang was developed with Sideshow Company as winner of their Freshness Initiative in 2015. Parts of Speech was winer of the Brink! Competition of the Renaissance Theatreworks in Milwaukee and will be presented in the Atemesia Fall Festival in Chicago in 2017. She is at work on a musical adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s novel Morality Play. Her most recent play, Headshots, has had readings in Chicago at the Trellis Project of the Greenhouse Theatre and the Saturday Series of Chicago Dramatists, and in New York at the Pulse Ensemble Company, directed by Alexa Kelly. Her children’s book The Giant Jam Sandwich has been translated into twenty languages and scored for orchestra, as have The Truck on the Track and The Perfect Pig. The Giant Jam Sandwich is currently touring England in a musical adaptation by the New Perspectives Company, and will be presented in 2017 at the Ediburgh Festival. The Truck on the Track is in development as a cartoon series by Naked Emperor Productions of Australia.
She is the editor of a 2014 collection of essays by older women authors, A Story Larger Than My Own from University of Chicago Press, and her memoir Losing Tim appeared in the spring of 2014 from Think Piece Publishers. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University, and was awarded the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing by the Florida Humanities Council.