The Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting (Est. 2013)

This award honors the memory of Marina Keegan ’12, a gifted playwright. Graduating seniors in English and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, as well as seniors in other departments who have studied playwriting at Yale, are invited to submit a portfolio of dramatic writing for consideration – two plays, at least one of them full-length.

2026

Aanika Eragam, Pierson College

Aanika Eragam discovered herself as a playwright at Yale. A Creative Writing concentrator in the English Department. Her two plays, Saniya’s Salon and Back to Bangalore, both selected for readings during the Yale Playwrights Festival, are exquisite evocations of diasporic life in our turbulent America for characters of Indian/South Asian descent. The extraordinary craftsmanship of these plays presages a future of great work from this playwright.

Edie Wolfe Lipsey, Pierson College

Edie Lipsey double-majored at Yale in Humanities and Studio Art. Both of these have coincided with and fed her passion for literature, particularly Russian literature. Edie’s parents recited part of James Joyce’s Ulysses at their wedding, and her life has been filled with the lyricism, aggravation, joys, and mysteries of that novel. Her beautiful thesis play, written in partial fulfillment of the BA in Humanities, entitled A Panel of Experts, shows the range of all these passions of Edie’s: it is an investigation of the semiotics and the distilled humanness of Joyce’s novel through the minds of a group of random people who have come together during an Irish winter to study and discuss the book.

2025

Chesed Chap, Pauli Murray College

As in the best writing for the stage, playwright Chesed Chap hears the voices of her characters rather than masterminds them; this young playwright melts the reader’s distance from her characters with compassion for them as they, like all of us, seek connection in a disconnected world.

Chesed is a beautiful playwright, and a beautiful student of playwrighting, which are distinct qualities she has always evinced. Her comic sensibility serves to deepen her themes of love in the face of obstacle; of striving in the presence of indifference; of loss and joy in the middle of youth and yearning.

She has distinguished herself at Yale as the leader and head writer of an on-campus comedy group, as a featured artist in the Yale Playwrights Festival, an an actor in numerous productions, and as a writer of great promise.

2024

Mikayla Johnson, Saybrook College

The Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting for SAPPHIRE, after jezebel and East of Mercy. Mikayla Johnson’s beautiful play East of Mercy, ached with the deepest look at the nature of family and memory, definitions of home, the diasporas of Blackness; the almost molecular forgiveness that comes with maternal love.

Hank Graham, Davenport College

The Marina Keegan Award for Excellence in Playwriting for The Mourning Show and The Final Flight of the Passenger Pigeon.

2023

Elliot Lewis, Branford College

2022

Gabrielle Poisson, Pauli Murray College

Charlotte Foote, Jonathan Edwards College

2021

Marty Chandler, Ezra Stiles College

Kevin Tang, Davenport College

2020

Walker Caplan, Branford College