Amparo Garcia-Crow: Write this way

Sometimes you just hit a roll. That seems to be the case with writer Amparo Garcia-Crow, whose recent work has been garnering attention from coast to coast. In the great northwest, her play Esmeralda Blue: La Mujer Moderna, a dark comedy with music, took first place in the Female Protagonist Project, a national competition sponsored by the Mae West Festival, an organization supporting the work of women onstage. Garcia-Crow receives $1,000 and a public reading of the play with professional actors and a director on Wednesday, Feb. 28, in Seattle. For more information, visit www.maewestfest.org. Also on the West Coast, Garcia-Crow's screenplay The Unknown Soldier was one of two finalists selected to represent the National Association of Latino Independent Producers in ABC and Walt Disney Studio's Talent Devel-opment Scholarship Grant Program, which awards $20,000 to emerging voices for development and completion of polished work.

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, her new play, The Faraway Nearby: A Day With Juan, pt. 1 and pt. 2, has been selected as a semifinalist for the 2007 National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. An earlier version of the play was featured in the 2005 Nosotros Playwrights Festival in Hollywood, Calif., and developed at the first Black and Latino Playwright Conference at Texas State University.

And here on the Third Coast, Garcia-Crow has won the Latino Playwrights Initiative Award, a new national playwriting competition for Latino writers sponsored by Austin Script Works in association with Teatro Vivo. She'll receive $1,500 to write a new full-length play. Finally, Garcia-Crow's short "Mosaic" was a finalist for the 2007 Heideman Award, the 10-minute play competition sponsored annually by the Actors Theatre of Louisville. This is Garcia-Crow's second time to be a finalist, the first being three years ago with "Beside Cool, Still Waters," which premiered at ATL that same year.

Currently, Garcia-Crow is teaching a creative-writing course for In2 the West, which will develop monologues for a new Austin Community College theatre production this spring, and working with fellow playwright C. Denby Swanson on a story for the Chronicle describing their experiences at the recent NoPassport Conference in New York, where playwrights, other theatre artists, and scholars from across the country met to discuss cross-cultural diversity in the arts.