Work
Theatre
2025 Hansberry-Lilly Fellowship Winner
The Dramatists Guild Foundation (DGF), in partnership with The Lillys, have announced graduate students Charlene Adhiambo and Amy B. Tiong as the 2025 recipients for the Hansberry-Lilly Fellowship. Created in honor of playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window), the fellowships ensure that the next generation of women and non-binary playwrights of color are able to follow in Hansberry’s footsteps, allowing them to create new work and develop their writing careers regardless of their economic situation. Each recipient receives a $25,000 stipend for each year of matriculation at select writing programs across the country, with up to $75,000 available to subsidize living expenses not covered by tuition. Past recipients of the Hansberry-Lilly Fellowship are Darrin Terpstra and Morgan Webber-Ottey (2024), and Amalia Oliva Rojas and Danielle Stagger (2023).
2025 June Bingham New Playwright Commission Finalist
2023 The Hearth Virtual Retreat Semi-Finalist
Guardian (2020), A One-Act
Set in Kenya in 1950, a young Kenyan girl named Anyango, who peddles fruit, meets a strange customer who talks of the future. Staged at the virtual Re-Discoveries Festival by Saudade Theatre.
Fiction
Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror, edited by Sofia Ajram (Ghoulish Books)
I contributed the short story “Lost and Found” to this amazing collection.
PRAISE FOR BURY YOUR GAYS
2024 Bram Stoker Award — Finalist, Superior Achievement in Anthology
2024 Shirley Jackson Award - Nominee, Edited Anthology
“Devastating, thought-provoking, and delightful. It’s a landmark in short horror fiction.” — Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED REVIEW
“A gruesome and decidedly queer patchwork revealing some of the most devastating and unsettling horrors I’ve ever encountered. Each page of Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror pulses with a distinct sense of inevitability, a horrifying sureness guiding the reader on a pathway toward destruction, toward utter despair. These pernicious little tales will haunt you long after you’ve been entombed in the enchantment of their grotesquery.” — Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
“Bury Your Gays draws pain into a bath, perfumes the water with lavender and bergamot, invites you to strip. Sink in. Stay a while. Drown.” — Rae Knowles, author of Merciless Waters
“Bury Your Gays sinks into a darkness that writhes with lust and dreams and death. An entrancing spiral into the countless nightmares of life as a queer person.” — Eric Raglin, author of Extinction Hymns
Publications
What Tina Turner Taught Me
“In a theater, I am freed by the voices that shake the rafters, the dancing, the lights, and the colors. Musicals are my form of catharsis.”
Take a Cue From Poetry
A poem for the Artists’ Grief Deck project.
PlayCo Joins the Digital Stage
An essay on the significance of my theatre company and others’ pivot to digital theatre.
Revisiting August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand”
An essay in which I reckon with my role as a young, black newcomer to the theatre industry.
On Grief, Remembrance, and Theatre
An essay reflecting on my virtual theatre debut with the reading of my play “Guardian”.
Interview with Erika Dickerson-Despenza: ‘Write the Thing that Changes the World’
I interviewed poet-playwright and cultural-memory worker Erika Dickerson-Despenza.
Me & The Mother City
My blog about lessons and adventures during my semester abroad in Cape Town, South Africa.