Biography
Raised in Boone, North Carolina, and educated at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and Cornell University, John Crutchfield is a poet, playwright and performer currently based in Asheville, NC. He is the recipient of a Morehead Foundation Scholarship, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and a La Napoule Residency Fellowship 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, Tenebrae, Twelve Treatises on Memory, and And Other Stories have been produced regionally, as have various shorter works, including On the House, Bob Agonistes, and Caliban’s Dream, a solo performance which premiered at the Asheville Fringe Arts Festival in January, 2007. He has also received two play commissions from The Blowing Rock Stage Company, for Jack-In-The-Park Tales (an adaptation of several Southern Appalachian “Jack Tales”) and Alice in Letterland (a series of three one-act plays for young audiences).
An avid collaborator, John has created and performed multidisciplinary work with X Factor Dance, Sans Pointe Dance, and G. Alex and the Movement. In addition to his work as a dancer and musician, he has recently appeared onstage as “Malvolio” in Twelfth Night (Appalachian State University) and as “Caliban” in The Tempest (Lenoir-Rhyne College).
John has been Artist-In-Residence at the Djerassi Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, at various high schools, colleges, and universities in the southeast, and has taught on the literature and creative writing faculties at Appalachian State University, Warren-Wilson College, the Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe (Germany) and the North Carolina Governor’s School East. He is a founding member of Blue Shift Theatre Ensemble and of Poison Frog Theatre, with whom he is currently collaborating on an interdisciplinary new work: The Flowers of Evil: An Immorality Play.
