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Friday, 16 May 2008 |
 Aaron Levy
Aaron Levy’s first young adult work, Pizza With Shrimp On Top, published by Dramatic Publishing in November of 2006, is a play that’s been produced over four dozen times around the country and recently, in March, had its first international production. Among other awards and honors, Pizza has just been nominated for the 2007 Distinguished National Play Award for the Middle and Secondary School Audiences by The American Alliance for Theatre in Education (AATE). Levy has been asked to serve on an authors’ panel for young adult drama at this year’s national conference for The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) in New York City in November of 2007. Pizza will also enjoy a full production with NYC actors at the ALAN Conference on Monday, November 19th. Work on a multi-media teachers’ guide for the play, including information and endorsements by top prevention and education officials, will be complete at summer’s end and debut at an August 9th staged reading for all three hundred English teachers at the seventeen high schools in Cobb County, Georgia. This pilot effort in Cobb County is the first step in getting the play into the hands of theatre and English teachers in several Georgia school districts, and eventually across the country.
Levy’s One Man’s Dance (now titled A Little Mental Illness) has garnered the Dorothy Silvers Playwriting award, Ari-Zoni Best Original Play in Arizona Award, an American College Theatre Festival selection, and a scene and monologue published selection in Smith and Kraus’ The Best Stage Scenes of 1994 and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 1994 respectively. Currently, it’s a requested submission for publication by Dramatic Publishing. His ten-minute plays, I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon and Bolt-Cutter Man were selected and produced in the Ten-Minute Play Showcases at Actors Theatre of Phoenix. Levy received a BA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a teaching certification. A former high school English and theatre teacher, Levy earned his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction in 2004 and now trains current and future English teachers, along with serving as the playwright-in-residence at Kennesaw State University, a growing campus twenty miles north of Atlanta, Georgia. He recently finished his first young adult novel, Blood Don’t Lie, which has since found literary representation and is in the process of being packaged for seeking publication. Levy has always had an extreme interest in writing for pre-teens and teens and plans to write many more YA books and plays, including writing an adaptation of Blood for stage. Besides his own writing endeavors, Levy loves doing readings and conducting writing workshops for teachers and students at area schools, training teachers in pedagogy and methodology, creating classrooms to develop student-written producible and publishable material, and most recently, promoting young adult dramas, Pizza and many others, in the English classroom. Levy currently resides in Marietta, Georgia where he lives with his wife, two kids, and a canine named Starbucks (a corporate dog). When he’s not writing, teaching, trying to convince his four-year-old to stick her head under the water, and begging his six-year-old to get out of the water, Levy enjoys playing basketball. At 5’8”, it’s been rumored that he plays high above the rim.
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