2025 One-Act Contest Finalists
Congratulations to our 2025 One-Act Contest Finalists, Winner, and Runners-Up!
Thanks to our one-act judge, Justin Maxwell, and our contest coordinator, Morgan Hufstader.
Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:
Born in New York City and raised in Marietta, GA, Michael Albanese first discovered his love for storytelling in his high school drama department. Inspired by his mercurial friendship with the late Edward Albee, Michael’s first play won The Black List’s x TRW Plays inaugural playwriting fellowship and was published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide in the fall of 2024. Michael served as Assistant Director to Mark Brokaw on the Broadway musical production of John Waters’ Cry Baby. Michael also wrote and produced the film Thirst, inspired by a true story and starring Melanie Griffith, Gale Harold, and Josh Pence. Michael loves coffee, playing basketball, and all expressions of art, especially the theatre. He lives, writes, and dreams in Atlanta with his wife, actress Wynn Everett, and their two daughters.
RUNNER-UP: Rebecca Chace is the author of Leaving Rock Harbor (novel); Capture the Flag (novel), Chautauqua Summer (memoir); June Sparrow and The Million Dollar Penny (middle-grade). Her fifth book, Talking to the Wolf (novel), is forthcoming in 2026. She is the author of two plays: Colette (Freehold Theater Lab, Seattle; Theatre for the New City, NYC) and The Awakening (adaptation of the novel by Kate Chopin, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Seattle). She adapted her novel, Capture the Flag, for the screen and television with director Lisanne Skyler (Best Screenplay Short Film, 2010 Nantucket Film Festival). She is Faculty Associate and Program Manager at the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Bard College.
RUNNER-UP: Bob Davis grew up in a small Georgia town. His father was a legally blind electrician and his mother was an avid yet eccentric reader. He is a practicing attorney who began his legal career helping farmworkers. Eventually he specialized in disability law and has been doing that ever since. If given the slightest bit of encouragement, he’ll extol the virtues of a good whiskey, or defend the virtues of a vinegar-based barbeque sauce. He’ll grin when he meets a fellow Devil Dog, but is apt to cry when he hears a certain piano sonata.
Reginald Edmund is a playwright, producer, and curator dedicated to amplifying Black voices in the arts. He is the co-founder of the Black Lives Black Words International Project and Executive Director of the LA and the Houston Underground Railroad Film Festival. With an MFA in Theatre/Playwriting, he has served as Director of Programming for the Anthology Film Festival and Resident Dramaturg at the Robey Theatre Company. A celebrated teaching artist, he has led workshops globally. His plays, including Southbridge and Juneteenth Street, have earned awards like the Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Award and Black Theatre Alliance Lorraine Hansberry Award.
Kimberly (“Kim”) Ferse is a performer, director, and playwright. Her short comedies have appeared in festivals at Revolution Stage Company in Palm Springs (2024, 2025) and online with NJ-based The Theater Project (2023, 2024, 2025). She is also developing a full-length musical parody, Angry Annie: An Orphan’s Revenge, with collaborator Angela Mitchell. Inspired by true-life events, Final Jeopardy is dedicated to the memory of her loving uncle, Donald.
Penny Middleton is a writer and storyteller whose work has been featured at the Classical Theatre of Harlem, La Jolla Playhouse, and beyond. With a background in playwriting, sketch comedy, and short fiction, she crafts narratives that explore self-discovery, resilience, and identity. She has collaborated with companies like Assembly Films and Collective NY, bringing stories to life across theater, live events, and media. An intersectional feminist and lover of words, she is dedicated to creating bold, thought-provoking work.
Jessica Mosher is a Canadian playwright, actor, and award-winning screenwriter based in New York City. In 2023, her short screenplay Good Evening, Marshall (Good Evening, Geraldine) won the prestigious Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition and in 2024, her short screenplay Routine Procedure was named a semifinalist in that same competition. Other theatre pieces include The Murder of Sherlock Holmes, a new comedy that she wrote with her very talented husband, and Divine Riot’s The A Train Anthology. She is an incoming MFA Candidate in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Bennington College, Class of 2027. www.jessicamosher.com
Alys Murray is a playwright, screenwriter and romance novelist from New Orleans, Louisiana. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and receiving her Master’s in Film Studies from King’s College London, Alys became a three-time internationally bestselling romance novelist. Subsequently, she pursued a career in film and television and has written for Hallmark, Lifetime, ViacomCBS, as well as for the U.K. market. She is a member of the inaugural Sony Homegrown Development Lab, and in 2024 was named a Netflix and Inevitable Foundation Visionary fellow. Her passion is writing genre fare for the romantic in all of us.
Daniel Stallings is a playwright, director, producer, and mystery writer who has been actively working in theatre for the past seventeen years, based primarily out of Southern California. His passion for the golden age of detective fiction from the works of Dame Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and more meets his devotion to theatre where he routinely writes, directs, and produces mystery plays around SoCal. He has directed forty productions to date. He has published two mystery novels, Sunny Side Up and Cleanup on Aisle Six, in the Li Johnson Murder Mysteries through Pace Press. If he had a drag name, it would probably be Dragatha Christie.
WINNER: Nicolette Ashley Visciano is a poet, songwriter, essayist, and educator. She is a born and bred New Yorker but her home is one she has made within herself, so that wherever she may go, she can always be at peace. Her poetry has been previously published by Flying Ketchup Press and is featured within her portfolio on Instagram @nicolette.ashley.poetry. She has released one song, titled not ur girl, on YouTube. Her fictional one-act play, Spit, is a tribute to Roxanne Shante—one of her personal hip-hop heroes—and describes a battle rap in which a survivor rises to tell her story.
Bruce Ward is a student at Northern Virginia Community College working toward a degree in English and pursuing his passion for writing. He has participated in many theatrical productions, both behind and in front of the curtain, his favorites being, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Guys and Dolls, Bye Bye Birdie, and The Music Man. Bruce grew up in rural Virginia and has been in grocery retail for eight years. He now lives in Mclean, Virginia and is the grocery store manager in Mclean Harris Teeter, ready to help you shop for a great meal at a great deal.
Robert Alexander Wray likes making things and figuring it all out later. He’s a graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop where he was awarded both the Norman Felton and Zeta Phi Eta Memorial Scholarship. He’s also won the Marc A. Klein Playwriting Award, the Slam! Theatre Festival (NYC), and been a finalist/semifinalist for numerous competitions, including the Heideman, Red Bull Theater Short New Play Festival, the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and The Dominic Orlando Playwriting Award. He’s a member of the New Circle Theatre Company and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia where he writes and imbibes the local wines on a semi-regular basis.
