Six plays have been selected as winners of this year's Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival. The winning works will be published and made available for licensing by Samuel French, a Concord Theatricals company.

The six winners are Krista Knight's CRUSH, Shara Feit's i didn't think you'd be so unhappy, Vincent Terrell Durham's Masking Our Blackness, Caity-Shea Violette's Slow Jam, Gethsemane Herron-Coward's The Falling Man, and Carissa Atallah's Voir Dire.

Usually held as an in-person festival contest at Off-Broadway's Vineyard Theatre, the ongoing health crisis caused this year's festival to be adjudicated solely from reading submissions, with a donation to the Vineyard made in lieu of the rental fee. A judging panel comprised of playwrights Will Arbery, George Brant, Larissa Fasthorse, Nambi E. Kelley, Kimber Lee, Madhuri Shekar, and Karen Zacarías, along with National New Play Network Executive Director Nan Barnett and Miami's City Theatre Co-Founder Susan Westfall, selected the winners from a group of 30 finalists, themselves chosen from more than 500 submissions.

“The Top 30 playwrights really brought their A game in their short plays, and the virtual judging sessions were full of great debate and discussion around the work presented this year,” says Festival Artistic Director Casey McLain. “We are more than thrilled to add these playwrights to the long-running tradition of unique stories told in the OOB Short Play series.”

The Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival was founded in 1975. Alumni playwrights include Jeremy O. Harris, Martyna Majok, Theresa Rebeck, Jen Silverman, Gracie Gardner, and Korde Arrington Tuttle. Tony-nominated playwright Dominique Morisseau (Skeleton Crew, Pipeline, Ain’t Too Proud – The Life and Times of the Temptations) was this year’s honorary festival playwright.

For more information visit OOBFestival.com.