Gloria Bond Clunie was recently honored with a 2011 Medallion Award from the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America. She is a member of the Playwriting Ensemble at the Regional Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater, where her plays North Star, Living Green and Shoes premiered. Other works include Drip; Secrets; the musical Sing, Malindy, Sing!; Merry Kwanzaa; Dreams; Smoke; Quark (a STAGE finalist); and an adaptation of Patricia McKissack’s Mirandy and Brother Wind. This drama specialist and founding artistic director of Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre in Evanston, Ill., has been given the Evanston Mayor’s Award for the Arts. Clunie has been recognized for her work in the arts and education by the NAACP, Alpha Kappa Alpha and Delta sororities and the American Alliance for Theatre & Education. Other recognitions include a Chicago Jeff Award, a Scott McPherson, Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwrights, New York’s New Professional Theatre Award, the Black Theatre Alliance Award in Chicago, and Illinois Arts Council grants. In April 2011, Sweet Water Taste was featured in the Harriett Lake Festival of New Plays at Orlando Shakespeare Theater. In May 2011, Buck Naked won the Heartland Theatre Company’s New Play Festival. In the summer of 2011, her new play Mercy Rising appeared in Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre’s Summer Dramatic Reading Series and at Penobscot Theatre’s Northern Writes Festival.
