HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JANE CHAMBERS
              (March 27, 1937 - February 15, 1983)
 Pioneer who wrote theatrical works with openly lesbian characters.

Jane was born in Columbia, South Carolina, grew up in Orlando, Florida, studied at Rollins College and intended to become a playwright. She dropped out of college after she encountered discrimination as a woman there. 

In 1971 she began to achieve recognition as a writer. She won the Rosenthal Award for Poetry, and her play Christ in a Treehouse won a Connecticut Educational Television Award.  She also received a Eugene O'Neill Fellowship for Tales of the Revolution and Other American Fables, staged at the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater. 

Her play, A Late Snow, produced at Playwrights Horizons in 1974, was one of the earliest plays to portray lesbian characters in a positive light.  In 1980 she started to work with The Glines, writing Last Summer at Bluefish Cove for their First Gay American Arts Festival, about the impact upon a woman and her lesbian friends after she is diagnosed with cancer. Ironically, she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.  She continued to write, producing My Blue Heaven for the Second Gay American Arts Festival at the Glines, and The Quintessential Image for the Women's Theatre Conference in Minneapolis.    Since 1984 there has been an annual award in her name, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award.