Howard Craft

  

Howard L. Craft is a poet, playwright and arts educator from Durham, N.C. He is the author of a book of poems, Across the Blue Chasm, and the plays The House of George, The Wise Ones, Tunnels, Stealing Clouds, Lonely Words, A Touch of Sugga, Fourth and a Mile, One Thang Fo Certain, Two Thangs Fo Sho,  The Vet Who Lived Underground: Dispatches from Beneath the Map, The Dragon: A Conversation with George Jackson, Caleb Calypso & the Midnight Marauders, Jade City Chronicles Vol:1 : The Super Spectacular Bad Ass Herald MF Jones and  Nina Simone : What More Can I Say?  Craft is also the writer and creator of the radio drama, The Jade City Pharaoh which airs on WUNC.

Craft has twice won the N.C. Central University New Play Project and has received the N.C. Arts Council Playwriting Fellowship. His play The Wise Ones was selected as one of the Raleigh News and Observer’s top productions for 2005, and his most recent work, Caleb Calypso & the Midnight Marauders, was selected as one of the best scripts for the 2009 Theatre Season by the Independent Weekly.

His plays have been produced at NCCU, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Carolina Theatre of Greensboro, N.C., and Manbites Dog Theatre, in Durham, N.C. Craft was honored when Karen Dacons-Brock, professor of theatre at N.C. Central University, received the 2007 Meritorious Achievement Award for Excellence in Direction from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for directing his play Lonely Words.

During the school year, Craft reaches hundreds of children through the United Arts “Artists in the Schools” program, where he has conducted poetry residencies and workshops for third- through 12th-grade students since 2000. He has twice been named North Carolina judge of the National Endowment of the Arts’ Poetry Aloud. He was a member of the Duke University Young Writer’s Camp faculty from 2000-2010, specializing in experimental poetry and screenwriting, and has taught playwriting workshops for adults through the N.C. Writer’s Network and the Taller Portobello Art Colony in Portobello, Panama.  He is currently the artist in residence for the Sonya Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He lives in Durham NC with his wife and son.