A central figure in the international avant-garde for fifty years, Rochelle Owens is a poet, playwright, translator, and video artist. She has published seventeen books of poetry, the most recent being Solitary Workwoman and is the author of four collections of plays, Futz and What Came After, The Karl Marx Play and Others, Futz and Who Do You Want Peire Vidal? and Plays by Rochelle Owens. She also edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays. A pioneer in the experimental Off-Off Broadway theatre movement, she is widely known as one of the most innovative and controversial writers of her generation, whose groundbreaking work has influenced subsequent experimental poets and playwrights. Since its first publication in 1961, her play Futz has become a classic of the American avant-garde theatre and an international success. In 1969, Futz was made into a film, which has attained a cult following. Her plays have been presented worldwide and in festivals in Edinburgh, Avignon, Paris, and Berlin. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Japanese, Swedish and Ukrainian. Owens has been a participant in the Festival Franco-Anglais de Poesie, and has translated Liliane Atlan's novel Les passants, The Passersby (Henry Holt, 1989). A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, she has held fellowships from the NEA, Ford, Guggenheim, Rockefeller (Bellagio), and numerous other foundations. A member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild, she has taught at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Oklahoma and has held residencies at Brown University and the University of Southwestern Louisiana. She has lectured and read widely in the United States and abroad. Owens lives with her husband, poet and translator George Economou, in Philadelphia and Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
