Melanie Maria is a poet, playwright, actress, and director. Originally from New Orleans, she is a stellar and imaginative dramatist whose work has been featured all across the country. Her works of poetry, known for their musicality and original voice, have been performed at such prestigious institutions as the Nuyorican Poets Café, Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, Wheaton College, St. Michaels College, and the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. Awarded grants by the Jerome Foundation and the East Orange-Orange Community Development Corporation for her work, playwriting is her first love, while poetry is intrinsic to her survival.

In New York City, her plays Saydee and Deelores, Walter, Bullets, and Binoculars, Mo’Batz’ Ride, Controle’s Predicament, and Sometimes It’s Very Much About Ownership, have been featured at Chelsea Playhouse, the House of Tribes Theater, the Abingdon Theater, Studio Players Theater, the Linhart Theater, the Lillian Theater in Los Angeles, and at the Nuyorican Poets Café during the 2004 HOWL Festival.

Douglas Turner Ward, founder of the Negro Ensemble Theater Company, has called Goodreaux “an extremely gifted writer” who writes with “enormous energy and poetic sensibility.” He says of her play Saydee and Deelores, “It is a delightful, thought- provoking work, written with incisive insight, acerbic wit, sly humor, and prickly compassion about a rare but timeless theme—the color codes and tensions within Black Society and their outside repercussions. ...the play rings with accuracy and authority.”

Her dramaturge, Anthony Saraluegi, calls her “an imaginative dramatist who blends the real with the surreal, the expressionist with the impressionist. She writes with gumption to deliver a collage of images, a medley of rhythms, and a kaleidoscope of color for the stage. She is truly an original.”

Melanie Maria also enjoys teaching creative writing to children across the boroughs of New York City through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She can be reached at melaniemaria1@hotmail.com.