Happy Pride, Happy Playwrights
It's June, y'all. Strap in.
announcements
Happy pride!!! Celebrate this month by supporting our queer and trans published playwrights! We have lots of events going on and ~pride boxes~ for sale, everything for your queer little heart’s content. Check it out.
upcoming events
Head over to The Tank to see FROM THE PAGE TO THE STAGE THEN ONCE AGAIN TO THE PAGE AND NOW WE’RE BACK ON STAGE… a celebration of self-produced works by trans playwrights Di Lobontiu, Genevieve Simon, and Andy Boyd, published by 1319 Press. The event is on June 13th 3pm, you can get your tix here!! (Don’t worry, you can head to Brooklyn Pride afterwards. ;) )
1319 Press playwright Joshua Piper’s play “Lumina Viventia” (which was a semifinalist for the Breaking & Entering Theater Collective Rooftop Reading Series) is being produced as a part of the Queerly Frigid Fringe Festival at Under St. Marks. The shows will be the 21st at 4:30 and the 27th at 4:00 PM! Here’s the link for tickets!
Rose Gonzales has an upcoming staged reading with PrideFest at The Tank! The Internet’s Boyfriend will be read June 22 @ 7pm, The Tank (312 W 36th St, New York NY, 10018). Here’s a lil synopsis: When actor Kiran Ramesh gets an email from Marley Park, a journalist best known for their candid marathon interviews with Hollywood giants, he’s met with a proposal: a one-hour interview every day, for a full calendar year. Sparks fly between interviewer and interviewee, and the two must tread the line between personal and professional as their 365 days together come to pass. Get your tickets here!
Also at The Tank, Marissa Alaniz’s new play, big blue, is having a production on July 19th and 20th. Marissa is also having a book launch event at Lofty Pigeon for her play Elizabeth. Here is the eventbrite link-- it is free! Fellow 1319 playwright Rhiannon Ling will be moderating!
new titles
Our May releases were: Brickgirl by Ryan Stevens, Ad Hominem by Rose Gonzales, and The Self-Destruction of Emma James by Kate Brennan. They are all available for purchase on our online bookstore.
Our newest release is Little to No Supervision by Javi Mederos. Available now.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John burst into their hotel room ready to crush their Mathletes competition, but old stories and new tensions have ways of coming up when you least expect them. Do they win their competition? What in the world is the “Chili’s Incident”? And who the hell is Bubby? Find out what happens when you leave four high school-aged boys in a hotel room alone with Little to No Supervision.
deals
Our limited edition 🌟PRIDE BOXES🌟are now available! The box is a surprise bundle of three plays by queer and trans authors in our collection, plus some merch and exclusive Pride stickers! ($60 value for $45!) They are available online now.
author spotlight
This pride month, we are highlighting one of our fabulous queer playwrights, Genevieve Simon! Genevieve (he/they) is a playwright and actor born in Ohio and based in New York. As a playwright, Genevieve centers queer people in magical worlds at the intersection of family, identity, and bodies of water. He is the 2026 Leah Prize winner for his play PUNCH BACK, and their climate-doom-comedy BLOOM BLOOM POW was a Finalist for the 2022 EMOS Ecodrama Playwrights Festival. They were a 2025 NYSCA Commission Winner, a 2023-24 New Georges Audrey Resident, and a member of the 2024 Page 73 Writers Group. Genevieve’s work has been supported by Ars Nova, The Bushwick Starr, Breaking The Binary, Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College, The Brick, Fresh Ground Pepper, The Motor Company, Oberlin College, Skidmore College, Willamette University, Shadowland Stages, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arts on Site, Holton-Arms School, Cincinnati Fringe Festival, The Parsnip Ship, and The Tank. Genevieve’s plays include THIS BUG IS GAY, GUARDING, SISTER/FRIEND, and HELL IS REAL. They have been published in Howlround Theatre Commons and by us, 1319 Press! Genevieve is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and Playwriting Lecturer at Skidmore College.
Tell us a little bit about your connection to 1319 Press and your upcoming event at The Tank.
“I wasn’t sure at first that publishing was a good idea for my writing career, because once a play is published you (and your work) are no longer eligible for certain “emerging” opportunities. Fun conundrum. But then my dad died suddenly, and in the process of taking care of the things he left behind, I felt a quiet clarity that I wanted some physical piece of my work to exist in the world. It felt good to imagine the script sitting on a friend’s bookshelf on the other side of the country. I liked the idea that a young person could find it and relate to it entirely differently than I do. The scripts I read at fifteen in rural Ohio changed my whole brain, and clued me in to the kind of art ecosystem I’m inside of now. The books my dad loved and the things he made were all I had left to understand him, and yeah, I felt it was important to leave a clue behind for someone else. A very gay clue.
Bloom Bloom Pow was also a script that defined a specific chapter of my life, one that introduced me to some of my closest friends, collaborators, and love. (happy pride, lol :) ) I’m so grateful to be able to celebrate that work and those people at The Tank on Saturday, June 13th (at 3pm! Did you get a ticket?!) with some of the original premiere cast members and director, along with Andy Boyd and Di Lobontiu’s amazing plays!
Andy, Di, and I wanted to do a book launch on our own terms (which feels very aligned with 1319’s mission to support playwrights!). The Tank was the obvious choice to host, as both Andy and I’s plays had their very first readings there, and it’s one of the few places in the city where I could afford to self-produce work when I was in my twenties. Bloom Bloom Pow, and thousands of other plays, don’t exist without The Tank. We’re so excited to celebrate these three extremely different plays by trans authors and talk with each other and the audience about how The Hell we keep making more trans plays right now.”
Tell us about your style, why you write and who you write for?
I generally start from a place of anger. I wrote a play about Anybodys (from West Side Story) before I even knew I was trans because I was so angry about how overlooked this vital character is. I also made that play with my friends to perform when we were young and not getting any work yet. In the case of Bloom Bloom Pow, I was angry that there were like, no plays where the protagonist was non-binary and that was not the point of their story. I was sick of seeing Climate Change Plays that were didactic and allegorical and pious. I needed a play that helped me grasp the scale of what humans are doing to the planet we live on. A play that gave me 90 minutes to sit with my terror and fury, instead of pushing it aside to get along with my day. I knew from experience that grief can be very funny. So I wrote that highly sensory climate-doom-comedy. With my play Punch Back, I remain furious to the gills at the violence that my home state of Ohio is enacting on young trans people.
Of course anger is a cover, and underneath that anger is a lot of heartbreaking love. My plays are love letters to my home, to my mom, to secrets, to my earliest friendships, to shitty jobs, to complicated loss, to the bottom of the ocean. To whoever comes next.
What’s a play you love? Or a playwright that inspires you?
I love Seayoung Yim’s wickedly funny play besotted that she’s still writing if she feels like it. I love anything Minna Lee makes, I love the prickly suspense I feel reading Calley Anderson’s plays, I love the insane worlds Utkarsh Rajawat cooks up. Heather Christian and Alex Tatarsky change my body chemistry.
The north star for me is Anna Deavere Smith. Both in her writing and her performance. The presence she emits! You cannot look away. The alignment of her values and politic in her art is something I come back to every time I ask myself how, why, and for whom I’m writing.
I was influenced early on by Chuck Mee, Sarah Ruhl, Caryl Churchill, Jose Rivera, Ursula K Le Guin, Run Lola Run, Horizon Youth Theatre, Eugene Ionesco, and my big sister.
Tell us something weird about you — a quirky fact perhaps...
When I was in fourth grade, in an attempt to make an unhappy teacher like me, I crocheted her an 8x10 image of Garfield (the cat). It took me a few months to complete. To be clear, she loved Garfield in a way that no other human ever has. I think I’ve moved past this kind of people-pleasing in my life. But I do still think about her classroom walls, covered head to toe in various Garfield memorabilia. A testament to loudly loving whatever you love.
PS - Seven years later, when my brother was her student, she had shifted gears entirely to I Love Lucy. People change.
Reminder to see Genevieve, Andy, and Di at The Tank on June 13th for a pride-filled evening of performance. Support our queer and trans playwrights this month and every month! That’s all for today. See you next time. Happy pride. :)