Biography

Raised in Boone, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and Cornell University, John Crutchfield is a writer and performer currently based in Asheville, NC. He is the recipient of a Morehead Foundation Scholarship, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and a Regional Artist Project Grant from the North Carolina Arts Council. His poems, essays, translations and reviews have appeared in a variety of literary and cultural journals, including Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Southern Review, Appalachian Journal, and Zone 3. His plays The Songs of Robert, Ruth, Twelve Treatises on Memory, Everything and God, and Ivory have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works and adaptations, including Caliban’s Dream and Black Snow Flying Upwards, or: My Embarrassment, two movement-based solo performances which premiered at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival in 2007 and 2008 respectively. His one-man version of The Songs of Robert was featured in the 2009 New York Interntional Fringe Festival.

An avid collaborator, John has created and performed multidisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, G. Alex and the Movement, and Legacy Butoh. He has also appeared onstage as “Malvolio” in Twelfth Night (Appalachian State University), “Caliban” in The Tempest (Lenoir-Rhyne Players), "Banquo" and "Doctor" in Macbeth (NCStage), "Prosecutor" in David Mamet's Romance (Zealot), "Fraser" in Mac Wellman's Description Beggared, or: The Allegory of Whiteness (Warren Wilson College), and "Peck" in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive (Warren Wilson College).

John has been Artist-In-Residence at the North Carolina Governor’s School East, the Djerassi Artists Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Association d’Art de La Napoule (France) and the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany), as well as at various American schools, colleges, and universities. He is Artistic Director of My Good Leg, a flexible collaborative devoted to creating new interdisciplinary performance. 

At present, he also teaches creative writing part-time at Warren Wilson College near his home in Asheville, NC, writes theatre reviews for the "Sightlines" page of Mountain XPress, and works freelance as a literary translator.