Laura Harrington is the 2014 Jack Kerouac Writer in Residence at UMass Lowell.
Harrington’s award-winning plays, musicals, operas, and radio plays have been widely produced in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Harrington is a two-time winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award in playwriting and a two-time winner of the Clauder Competition for best new play in New England for Mercy and Hallowed Ground. Much of her work is inspired by her fascination with history and her commitment to work that explores the human cost of war, from the Civil War (Hallowed Ground) to WWI (The Book of Hours) and WWII (Fifteen Minutes at Midway).
She has indulged in a lifelong love affair with all things French, and, in particular, French history, from her plays Martin Guerre and Joan of Arc, to her most recent work about Napoleon in exile, N Bonaparte.
In 2008, Harrington won the Kleban Award for “the most promising librettist in American Musical Theatre.” Her other awards include the 2009 MIT Levitan Prize for Excellence in Teaching, a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Grant-in-Aid, the Joseph Kesselring Award for Drama, a New England Emmy, and a Quebec Cinemateque Award.
Harrington’s first novel, Alice Bliss (Penguin/ Viking 2011) was the winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in fiction. Harrington has taught playwriting at M.I.T, Tufts, Harvard, Wellesley, University of Iowa, and other campuses.