Sybil Rosen

Sybil Rosen was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1950. From an early age she was writing. Her father had a workshop in the basement complete with a big clunky Underwood typewriter. At 5 she would sit at it and type poems to God. Her first short story, about a Native American princess who runs away from her village, contained the memorable line, "Her absence was missed by everyone." Drawn to the theater and acting, she began writing plays at the age of 29 and felt like she had "come home." Her play, "Brink of Devotion", was selected for the 1984 Sundance Playwriting Institute in Provo, Utah. Her plays - "Curves" "Life After Death," and "Last of the Speckled Catfish" have been produced in theaters across the country, and a ten-minute play, "Duet for Bear and Dog," has received over 100 productions worldwide. A Young Adult novel, "Speed of Light," won the 1999 Sydney Taylor Award for Older Readers and was nominated for a 2000 Mark Twain award. A memoir of life in a treehouse with Texas music legend Blaze Foley, "Living in the Woods in a Tree," was adapted for the 2018 movie BLAZE, co-written by herself and Ethan Hawke, who directed the film. "Riding the Dog," a collection of short stories that all take place on a Greyhound bus, received the 2015 Readers' Favorite Gold Medal for Fiction/Short Story. A children's picture book, "Carpenter's Helper," will be published by Random House in the spring of 2021.