Photo: Kolin Smith
Biography
Robert Myers (www.robert-myers.com) is the author of more than a dozen stage plays, many of which deal with history and politics. His works include Atwater: Fixin' to Die, about George H. W. Bush's principal political advisor, Lee Atwater; The Lynching of Leo Frank (winner of the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Work, 1998-99), based on the case of a Jewish engineer from Brooklyn accused of child murder in Atlanta in 1913; Dead of Night, about the government-sanctioned murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969; Heartland, a black comedy about white supremacists; Perfectly Clear, about Richard Nixon and the Watergate tapes; Against My Heart, about the British Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble and her visit to a plantation in Georgia in 1839; Mesopotamia, about Gertrude Bell and the British occupation of Iraq after World War I; and Painting Persia, inspired by the 1840s expedition to Iran by the French painter Jules Laurens and geographer Xavier Hommaire de Hell. He has also written several screenplays and a number of articles on theatre and culture for The New York Times and other publications. He has a Ph.D. in literature from Yale University and has received two Fulbright Fellowships to teach playwriting and theatre at the University of Rio de Janeiro and in Amman, Jordan. He is currently an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and the Director of the Center for American Studies at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon.
