Arthur M. Jolly Announced As 2009-10 Winner Of Joining Sword & Pen Competition

Babes With Blades, with SAFD fight master David Woolley, will announce Arthur M. Jolly as the 2009-10 winner of Joining Sword and Pen, their playwriting competition devoted to increasing the number of quality scripts featuring fighting roles for women, on April 8, 2009, 7 p.m., at T's, 5025 N. Clark in Chicago. Jolly's script is a drama titled Tjurjága (pronounced Tyoor-YAH-gah, Russian slang for jail), which is set in an inmates' bunkhouse of a Siberian gulag in 1949 post-war Soviet Union.

The winning script was inspired by, and must incorporate the image Film Noir by Chicago artist Kristine Borcz (pictured at www.babeswithblades.org/competition.htm). Jolly will receive a $1,000 cash prize, and a full production of the script in spring 2010. Please note: "With" is capitalized in Babes With Blades.

Arthur M. Jolly was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a Nicholl Fellowship in
Screenwriting in 2006 and works as a screenwriter in Los Angeles. He is the playwright of Past Curfew (2008 AOPW fellowship winner), and the radio play Thicker than Water, which will be broadcast on NPR this August. Other produced plays include Tiger in a Cage, Howie's Last Words, Better by Candlelight, The Fine Print, and The Christmas Princess. His short play How Blue is My Crocodile will be produced in Los Angeles in June, and has been purchased by DVA productions to be made into an animated short film.

Jolly was born in the UK, lived in England, Kenya, Madagascar and France until the age of eleven, when his family moved to New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where Pulitzer Prize winner Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes) - then an unknown English teacher - was a major influence on his writing. Jolly's early career was in the film industry in New York, where for twelve years he worked every possible below-the-line job, from stuntman and special effects artist to food stylist and cockroach wrangler (not the same production). He has over 150 film and television credits, but some of them are cockroach wrangling. He currently lives on a houseboat in Marina del Rey, and is represented by Toochis Morin at The Brant Rose Agency. More at www.arthurjolly.com

Joining Sword and Pen was launched in 2005. The inaugural 2005-6 competition was inspired by a print of
Emile Bayard's An Affair of Honor, and netted the Babes over 40 one-act entries. The two winning one-acts, Chicagoan Byron Hatfield's Mrs. Dire's House of Crumpets and Solutions and New Zealander Tony Wolf's Satisfaction, were staged at the Viaduct Theater, April 7 - May 14, 2006, under the title An Affair of Honor (www.babeswithblades.org/affairhonor.htm). The 2007-8 competition was based on Duelo De Mujeres (The Duel of Women), named after a painting by José Ribera, and netted the Babes over 20 full-length entries. The winning play, Chicagoan Barbara Lhota's Los Desaparecidos (The Vanished), was staged at the Raven Theatre, April 6 - May 11, 2008 (/www.babeswithblades.org/losdesaparecidos.html).

Babes With Blades' 2009-10 season opens with the fall 2009 world premiere of "The Last Daughter of Oedipus" by ensemble member Jennifer L. Mickelson.