Literature Grant
2020 Summer Grantee
Jane Elias

Jane Elias is an actor, writer, and teaching artist based in Brooklyn, NY. As an actor she most recently appeared in the world premiere of the late Mark Medoff’s play Time and Chance at the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces, NM. Other theater includes Hamlet and As You Like It at the Theater at Woodshill in upstate New York, and the NYC premiere of Arlene Hutton’s Letters to Sala at The Barrow Group. Jane’s solo play Do This One Thing for Me, which was developed with Matt Hoverman in GO-SOLO and explores the relationship between the playwright and her father, a Holocaust survivor from Greece, premiered in the 2013 Estrogenius Festival and later ran in NYC at Access Theater, the TBG Theater, the Secret Theatre, and most recently in the 2018 NY International Fringe Festival. Jane’s play Baby Steps was a finalist for the City Theatre National Award for Short Playwriting and the Heideman Award; and her play Girl Is Mine was a nominee for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and is a semifinalist for the 2020 Austin Film Festival playwriting competition. Her short film Placeholders, which she wrote and co-directed, had its NYC premiere in 2019 at Cinema Village as part of the New York Short Film Festival. Jane’s poetry and fiction have appeared in literary magazines including Washington Square, The Southampton Review, translitmag, and podium. She holds a BA in English from Duke University and an MFA in poetry from NYU. Acting training: Michael Howard Studios; Larry Singer Studios; The Barrow Group.

#SonnetCoronaProject is a series in which Jane writes a new sonnet each day for a different actor to perform. Launched on May 14, this project was conceived as an ongoing creative collaboration that champions a generative and tenacious spirit, building an ever-growing chain of many artists’ voices.

The actors complete a brief questionnaire that serves as a writing prompt so that each composition emerges from a kind of dialogue between poet and actor. Every morning Jane posts the video and text of that day’s sonnet on her Twitter.

The sonnets form a corona, or crown, a linked sequence in which the last line of each poem becomes the first line of the next, and so on until the final poem, whose last line will repeat the first line of the first sonnet. The goal is to keep the sequence going until a coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available in the United States. 

You can follow #SonnetCoronaProject daily on Jane’s Twitter. You can also find Jane on Instagram, Facebook and her website.