Calling All Playwrights, Poets, and Prose-Smiths! Fenimore Art Museum Opens Submissions For Its 2025 Winter Performing Arts Series

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Fenimore Art Museum’s Glimmer Globe Theatre is pleased to announce its 2025 NEXT! Readings of New Works by Regional Playwrights and Write Out Loud performances, both planned to take place at the museum early next year. The museum is currently looking for submissions of plays, poems, prose and short stories for consideration. All submission guidelines can be found at fenimoreartmuseum.org/submissions. Deadline for submissions is January 19, 2025.

NEXT! has continued to garner acclaim over the last seven years, providing one of the few opportunities for playwrights in Central New York to have workshopped staged readings before an audience. The rehearsal process, audience feedback/talkbacks, and direct collaboration amongst playwrights, directors, and actors have helped numerous regional dramatists develop new work and move careers forward. Fenimore Art Museum’s Manager of Performing Arts Programs will work closely with each selected playwright to assign a director, cast the show, run rehearsals on-site, market the event, and execute the performance. Performances will take place live in early 2025.

Now in its fifth season, Write Out Loud mirrors NEXT! in many ways, but will be open to other written media – poetry, prose, short stories, and more. Fenimore’s Glimmer Globe Theatre leadership team will judge submissions individually and anonymously, selecting those of exceptional quality for a special live performance in late winter 2025. Authors will have the option to work with Glimmer Globe Theatre to cast a regional actor to perform their piece, or to perform their own work if preferred.

Fenimore Art Museum is committed to fostering appreciation for the arts in all its forms. This is an exciting opportunity for talented regional writers to gain support and exposure for the important, but often overlooked, work that they do. The program aims to provide people of all ages with a unique chance to witness and engage in the creative process, as well as to develop the perception of theater and literature as essential tools for communication and understanding.

About Fenimore Art Museum

Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, presents changing exhibitions each season. Past shows have featured artists such as Keith Haring, Ansel Adams, Banksy, M.C. Escher, and many others. The museum features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings from artists including Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Childe Hassam, Martin Johnson Heade, Robert Henri, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, Joshua Johnson, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, Max Weber, and James McNeill Whistler; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org.