Robert Cole
Biography
Robert Cole is a dramatic writer, essayist, and educator from Walker County, Alabama.
He is the author of the Walstone/Walbridge County plays, including To Wander in the Dust, or Fire Nights, The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me, Miss Merleen, and Songs of the Valley as well as the short play cycles The Brotherhood Cycle and Walstone and the short plays Minding the Storm and The Way She Lost Her Smile. He also wrote Cry of the Native Children, an adaptation of George Washington Parke Custis' Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia, and Love Suicide, an adaptation of Chikamatsu Monzaemon's The Love Suicides at Sonezaki. His plays have been performed at the Martha Moore Sykes Studio at the Virginia Samford Theatre, the Actor's Studio at the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center, the Bell Theatre at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and the Library Theatre at the Hoover Public Library, among others. He won the 1999 Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award in Playwriting and his plays have been honored as finalists or honorable mentions in prize contests awarded by the University of Arkansas, Northern Michigan University, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Alabama Writers' Forum, and the Horizon Theatre. After training as an actor, he studied playwriting with David Henry Hwang (Tony Award, M. Butterfly; Obie Awards, FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face), Gladden Schrock (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist, Letters from Alf; first Playwright-in-Residence, Yale School of Drama), and Lee Eric Shackleford (Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award, Holmes and Watson; Playwright-in-Residence, UAB). He is a graduate of Athens State University (B. A., English; Kappa Delta Pi and Cum Laude honors), Bennington College (B. A., Drama/Theatre) and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. He serves as the Theatre/Film teacher at Pinson Valley High School and lives in Sumiton, Alabama.