Crescent Dragonwagon will focus on and further develop her first play, Until Just Moistened: A Not-Quite-One-Woman Show, with Crumbs. The play, accepted for and produced by the 2018 Arkansas New Play Festival, is the story of grieving, told in part through cornbread. A two-person play, including music by Bill Haymes (a Nashville-based professional singer-songwriter and friend), its themes of love, loss, grief, regeneration, friendship, resilience, rediscovery are both particular and universal.
Crescent Dragonwagon’s first two books (a children’s book and a cookbook) were accepted for publication in 1969, when she was sixteen. Forty-eight books, in five genres, followed, along with a Coretta Scott King Award (Half a Moon and One Whole Star) and a James Beard Award (Passionate Vegetarian). In 2018, her first play, Until Just Moistened: a Not-Quite One-Woman Show, with Crumbs, was produced by the New Play Festival. Widowed in 2000, she moved from Eureka Springs, where she’d lived for 36 years. After fifteen years in Vermont, she returned to Arkansas. She now lives, writes, and teaches in Fayetteville.