Deaf Heart

Willy Conley is an award-winning playwright who has published in American Theatre, The Deaf Way II Anthology, Deaf World, Stages of Transformation, Theatre For Young Audiences Today, The Tactile Mind, No Walls of Stone, Deaf American Poetry, Deaf American Prose, Deaf Lit Extravaganza, and Daring to Repair Anthology. He has two books of plays, Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays and Broken Spokes. His plays have had professional productions nationwide and internationally, at venues such as the Kennedy Center, the Boston Center for the Arts, ARBOS, the Boston Playwrights Theatre, CenterStage, the National Theatre of the Deaf, Imagination Stage, Olney Theatre, Walnut Street Theatre, Amaryllis Theatre, Bailiwick Repertory Theatre, Omaha Diner Theatre, and off-off Broadway. He has garnered awards from the VSA arts 2000 Playwrights Discovery Competition, the Sam Edwards Deaf Playwrights Competition, The American Deaf Drama Festival, the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, the '99 and '97 NeWorks Festival in Boston, the Laurent Clerc Cultural Fund, the Lamia Ink! International One-Page Play Festival, and is a recipient of a PEW/National Theatre Artist Residency grant and the 2007-2008 Schaefer Professorship. Conley is a professor of Theatre Arts in the Department of Art, Communication, and Theatre at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC.