John Pielmeier

Playwright John Pielmeier started out as an actor, working in various theater groups, including the O'Neill National Playwrights' Conference where his play Agnes of God was first staged. A winner of the 1979 Great American Play Contest, Agnes of God eventually had a seventeen-month run on Broadway.

His other plays include Courage, a one-man show about JM Barrie that has also been filmed by Kentucky Educational Television; Jass; Young Rube, a musical comedy about cartoonist/inventor Rube Goldberg; and Willi, a one-man show based on the speeches of mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, which Pielmeier himself performed at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, WA, breaking box office records.

Pielmeier received a Christopher Award, the Humanitas Award, a Writers Guild of America nomination and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. Edward's University in Austin, TX, for Choices of the Heart, a television movie he wrote about American missionaries slain in El Salvador. He has written several movies for television, as well as the screenplay for the film Agnes of God which also received a Writers Guild nomination.

Most Famous Works

• Agnes of God (1979)
• The Boys of Winter (1985)
• Courage
• Choices of the Heart