Judy Klass

Senior Lecturer of Jewish Studies and English

B.A. (Sarah Lawrence College)
M. Phil and D. Phil. (Oxford University)

Judy Klass is a Truman Scholar. Eight of her full-length plays and thirty-six of her one-act plays have been produced; her short plays have gone up all over the country as well as in the UK and Ireland. Her produced full-length play Cell was nominated for an Edgar and is published by Samuel French/Concord. Her full-length play Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One won the Dorothy Silver Award for Best New Jewish Play in 2006 had five staged readings, and was produced at Chaffin’s Barn Theatre in Nashville, after coming in Second in their Clash of the Playwrights competition. Her full-length play Country Fried Murder won the S.O.P.S. competition and was produced at the Shawnee Playhouse in Pennsylvania in 2019. In 2021 it was produced as a Zoom recording/podcast by Quarantine Players. Three of Judy’s short plays are published, each as a stand-alone script, by Brooklyn Publishers. Her short plays have appeared in anthologies like The Art of the One-Act. One is in press in The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2021. Long ago, Judy wrote an original-series Star Trek novel published by Pocket Books. She co-wrote the Showtime cable film adaptation of Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies. Her original screenplay Au Pair Girl was optioned four times; she turned it into a YA book published by a small press. Three books of her poems have been published by small presses. Her poems have appeared in Piedmont Literary Review, Shenandoah, Slant, Pivot, Faultline, the Brooklyn Review, Ship of Fools, iota, and the Long Island Quarterly, among other places. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Magazine, Wind Magazine, Muse & Stone, Phoebe, Bryant Literary Review, Satire, Space & Time, The Courtship of Winds and Albedo One, among other places. Her articles on American politics have appeared in the Portuguese magazine O Mundo Em Portugues and in Resurgence. As a songwriter, she co-wrote Maine Mendoza’s hit song/video in the Philippines called “Lost With You,” and has cuts with Filipino artists such as Ariel Rivera, Eurika and Rachelle Ann Go. She co-wrote a Euro dance club hit called “Disappear,” sung by Adara, and has cuts in the US with artists and bands such as Coyote Crude, Hilda Lamas, Simon Kirke (the drummer in Bad Company), Brandon Maddox and Iron Cowboy. She co-wrote nine songs in the musical comedy film Cooking for Two, shot in Hong Kong and available on Tubi TV.