Playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks on Why Theater Matters

Michelle Kholos Brooks is an award-winning playwright with productions across the U.S. and Canada.

Her new play Hostage, based on a true story of a Midwestern mother who traveled to Tehran in 1979 to negotiate the release of her hostage son, was selected as a finalist for the 2016/17 Woodward/Newman Drama Award, the Fratti Newman Political Play Contest, and was a 2017 Showcase finalist for the National New Play Network. Other plays include Hitler’s Tasters and Kalamazoo.

A former journalist and producer for public radio programs such as Marketplace and The Savvy Traveler, Brooks earned a B.A. from Emerson College and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Otis College of Art and Design. She is currently nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council within the Scowcroft Center on Strategy and Security, where she is working on a series of monologues with veterans.

On the episode, she talks candidly about why she chose to write plays, how she keeps herself motivated and her topics interesting, and what it was like meeting the real-life version of one of her characters.