We are excited to announce our winning plays of the 2026 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Competition!
Each play will be developed in a two-week event in September 2026. During those two weeks, each play will be workshopped with a professional dramaturg, a faculty director and a student cast. The festival culminates in a public staged reading of each play.
Full-Length Winners
The Winger by Frauke Thielecke
When the 14-year-old Black Somali Maxwell Ellis proves himself as a successful new central striker on the local soccer team, he draws the attention of his teammate, Lucas, whose interest gradually turns into open harassment. Nina, the coach, intervenes first, but she soon realizes that the racism embedded in the team runs deeper than she imagined.
About the playwright:
Frauke Thielecke is a German filmmaker and theater director. Her short film Dunkelrot (Dark Red) received the Max Ophüls Prize, and her graduation film Abendlied (Evening Song) won the Studio Hamburg Young Talent Award. Since the fall of 2023, she has been pursuing a PhD in the International Writers Track in Comparative Literature with a focus on screenwriting and playwriting. The Winger marks her second participation in the Hotch Fest; her first play, Follow the…, was selected in 2024.
What We Talk About or The Common Room Play by Anna Schwartz
The Common Room Play follows a group of five roommates as they attempt to find love throughout their freshman year of college. These passionate young women overcome real life challenges while exploring a new social landscape and building deep, meaningful friendships.
About the playwright:
Anna Schwartz (’28) is a drama and writing student from Atlanta, Georgia. She took part in HotchFest as an actor in 2024 and a playwright of a ten-minute show in 2025. Anna is a Howard Nemerov Writing Scholar, Vice President of WUSlam (WashU’s slam poetry group), and participates in student theater through Cast n’ Crew. She also works for Hillel as a PR and Marketing intern and for the RSVP Center as an actor (2025) and director (2026) for The Date.
Winning Ten-Minute Play
Crooked by Chinonso Anyanwu
Crooked stages an intimate confrontation between two Nigerian-American sisters in which the meticulous act of hair braiding becomes a charged site for negotiating grief, cultural inheritance, and the burdens of familial expectation. Through escalating dialogue and embodied tension, the play reveals how unspoken histories of violence, migration, and aspiration fracture identity, exposing the fragile limits of control and the psychological cost of striving for an impossible coherence.
About the playwright:
Chinonso Anyanwu is a Nigerian playwright, theatre-maker, and performance scholar whose work centers African and African diasporic stories within contemporary transnational contexts. She gained national recognition in Nigeria through a 2021 national universities playwriting award, and her work often focuses on complex women and morally layered characters navigating power, belief, and belonging. While she sometimes draws on African cosmology and folklore, her broader practice engages pressing social questions in the present moment. Chinonso is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Theatre and Performance Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where her research examines the relationship between law and performance. She explores how legal systems construct authority and identity through performative acts of truth, credibility, and evidence. She will continue this work at Northwestern University in Fall 2026, pursuing doctoral study.
The 2026 A.E. Hotchner Playwriting festival will take place on September 18 & 19, 2026 at 7:30 p.m.
